At the moment Microsoft is gearing up for another swag of mobile devices, this time running Windows Mobile 6.5 which finally has a base level of support for Gestures (Oh, and a mostly usable revamp to the default interface). With all the hype given to WM6.5 by both Microsoft and those that follow what’s going on there, such as Mary-Jo, you’d think that there would be a host of new features for developers. Well, think again…..
I commend Marcus for coming out with this post that is part 1 of a discussion talking about getting started with understanding and using gestures. With gesture support in the base OS, you would ask “why do I have to write all this plumbing to get gesture support in my application?” Why is it left to the community (again) to build controls that really perform well and take advantage of the device features?
In an interesting discussion with fellow device MVP, Chris Tacke, he mentioned that in a recent application he just used a custom control that he had written. And by just I mean, he has a single control that can be configured to represent all your standard controls such as label, button, checkbox etc. This is just one illustration of the lengths to which .NET CF developers have had to go to build rich user interfaces.
I agree with Mary-Jo that it would be nice to know whether Microsoft is going to enable mobile developers in the next release of the Windows Mobile platform. Every WM developer I know has at least considered jumping ship to other fruity platforms…. please Microsoft, step up and give us some hope and support, instead of feeding us this dribble about how great WM6.5 is.