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ShopSavvy selected as Windows Phone 7 App of the Week!
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The guys over at the Windows Phone Dev Podcast selected ShopSavvy as their app of the week. Hosted by Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk, the Windows Phone Dev Podcast is the first online show, exclusively, about Windows Phone development. This show is produced by developers for developers. Each week, Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk traverse the exciting world of the Windows Phone development platform. They’ll discuss news and latest developments, all the while, putting it in the perspective of what it means for developers.
ShopSavvy for Windows Phone 7, finally. . .
Most of you assumed it would never happen (I was beginning to agree), but Microsoft has finally released ShopSavvy for Windows Phone 7. After much wrangling and negotiating with Microsoft they have decided to release our scanner app iphone, WITHOUT live scanning for the time being. They have their own ‘tag’ app that uses live scanning and I think they want to give it a headstart before allowing ShopSavvy to go full-on live. Anyway, the app looks pretty cool (full on metro styling) and will give you the same results that the iPhone and Android versions provide. It is definitely a 1.0 version – i.e. not 4.0 (like iPhone and soon Android), but it is a good start.
Why Windows Phone 7 is Important
If you were like me you would have asked why Microsoft was bothering to build yet another smartphone operating system (aka Windows Phone 7) to compete with blockbuster hits like the iPhone and Android. If you worked on WinMo 6.5 you might be even MORE jaded. But I want to suggest that, in the end, it won’t be the operating system that is relevant it will be the apps. It is ALL about the apps now. If developers embrace a platform and great apps emerge an operating system will succeed. After seeing our own team’s work on the Windows Phone 7 version of ShopSavvy and other developers work I am more and more bullish about the platform. Microsoft really has a shot at making something really great.
ShopSavvy on Windows Mobile Update
The Windows Mobile version of ShopSavvy is on hold indefinitely. I wouldn’t expect a Windows Mobile version of ShopSavvy until sometime next year.
Late this summer we put EVERYTHING on hold and worked to build a Windows Mobile version of ShopSavvy for the Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Marketplace launch. Our friends at Microsoft offered us a slot as the feature app for the major launch event – many of which never ended up occurring. We completed ShopSavvy, but at the 11th hour we learned of a requirement that was never documented or explained to us – the need for SQL Server CE to be included in ShopSavvy. It is a long technical story, but basically we needed to compile an installer for our installer. In other platforms such as Android and iPhone all applications share a database – each application using it as necessary. On Windows Mobile each application must include its own database SERVER (not just a client) requiring 2MB of space. Nightmare. This will be resolve in a future release of Windows Mobile. In the meantime the coding effort required to add this functionality to ShopSavvy would have delayed our iPhone release even further and we decided we had to release prior to Black Friday.