At 1:50pm on Track 2 James Morse (Creative Director) and Rik Dodsworth (Engineering Lead) from Matchbox are doing a Windows Phone Crash Course at Future of Mobile, where they will introduce the design thinking behind Windows Phone development, and take you through the basics of creating an app using Expression Blend and Visual Studio. Developers will gain an understanding of the tools and philosophy through discussion and demos from two industry experts in mobile design and code. Bios of James and Rik can be found here.
We wanted to get inside their heads and discover their thoughts on Windows Phone.
Who is Matchbox?
The core team at Matchbox has been working together on mobile projects for over a decade. Based in Brighton, England, we have always had good ties with phone manufacturers, wireless operators, and OS vendors like Microsoft.
How did you get into Windows Phone development?
We arrived at Windows Phone from two separate directions. First, we’d been working on Windows Mobile and Windows CE for years, writing apps, replacement UI shells and drivers, and building ROMs. Secondly, we had some high-profile apps on Zune HD, which featured the ancestor of the Metro UI that debuted on Windows Phone. Because of our established presence in the field we were asked to write Colorizer, one of the keynote demo apps for the global launch of Windows Phone 7 back in 2010.
What attracted you to the Windows platform?
For us, having created Metro-styled apps using XNA, 
and having had to push Windows Mobile to the limit with custom controls and gesture handling in order to bring in some modern UI features from other platforms, Windows Phone was a huge relief. Not only did it give us a really easy way of creating touch-enabled interfaces, but it also meant the historical gap between design and development was effectively bridged. Using Blend , XAML and Silverlight meant we could ensure that the design team’s vision was a) feasible to implement and b) would look the same on the phone as on our designers’ laptops.
For me, the Future of Mobile is a world where the web is king, or at least using web technologies with a framework like PhoneGap. And moe WP7 devices like mine
The future of mobile is /tomorrow/
The Future of Mobile is… calling it Future of Interfaces according to Anthony Ribot.
He’s right!
How far into the future do you want us to go? I’m looking forward to the day we have flat screens that wrap flawlessly around the wrist. :p (And built in lasers for fighting the inevitable machine uprising – that’s just common sense…)
The future of mobiles is highly powered devices that work for 4 hours until the battery runs out. At least it will be until battery research catches up with rest of technology
There seems to be an issue with commenting on this post… Keep posting your comments as we have access to them all in the back end and I’ll look into it to get it fixed
Thanks guys!
Luke
MVC to the max, data in the cloud accessible is different ways on different devices. Data displayed intelligently and GUI will become more transparent.
The future of mobile is interconnected, always-on lives. Seamless integration of technology throughout daily life enabling easy completion of tasks. Secure, viable, permissive, invisible.
Future of mobile is touch, it is accessable interfaces to every demographic. The passion we have to bring the best experience to our customers will shine in this space from small business of one person battling to earn the next meal to the enterprise … Future is mobile.
The FOM is high performance user experience, be it native or HTML5!
The future of mobile is devices taking over from pc’s, apps and content accessed and stored online, cross site social compatibility and the sharing of information on a wider scale.
The future of mobile is commitment to users and passion for great interfaces, that’s the route: the destination is still up for grabs.
We’re half way through the Future of Mobile this year, and we did have a lot of good stuff already. Especially liked the talk by @brianleroux about PhoneGap, it looks like something worth further investigation. The other thought I have is that the bias here definately is towards cross-platform development, using web-like technologies, rather native ones.
The future of mobile is not about devices or platforms themselves, it is about those pieces of technology enabling people to engage in communication, commerce, reportage and information consumption whenever and wherever, without dependence on specialist tools or organisation. The bit where people like the attendees of this conference come in is creating something that makes those activities flow. It is a profoundly democratising technology.
I think that the future of mobile is quite promising. Mobile devices (phones, tablets, …) will definitely influence the way we work, the way we live and also get rid of the computer as we still know it
This “revolution” has already started with touchscreens, small portable netbooks but is far from it’s end. There will be great innovations in that sector that will make standalone pcs disappear.
The future of mobile in Android
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I think the future of mobile will lean more towards a cohesive web experience, with native applications making use of webviews for content where appropriate. I hope this simple content-first approach will carry through back to the ‘full’/'desktop’ web – letting users get to what they want as easily as they can on their mobiles!
Future of Mobile is a signpost for mobile development companies and mobile developers. It exposes the choices we have to make, the areas we should focus on and the approaches we may take, when considering our future in the world of mobile technologies.
The future of mobile? Everything, not just phones and computers, you use is connected to the internet and apps across all devices work together.
Really looking forward to haptic feedback touch screens. Think this will open up great new opportunities for mobile interfaces.
The future of mobile will be awareness – “micro-location”, detecting objects (rfid) and people! Allowing information to change places and hands without any (necessarily) user interaction unless completely needed.. such as checking location in the background and alerting the user to something.
The issues of users worrying over what app is available on which platform also needs to disappear, to increase adoption.
It’s all the web!
#fom has proved excellent this year. Particularly impressed with Brian LeRoux from PhoneGap’s presentation. Informative, Educational, and Entertaining. And also a bit rude, which is always nice in a presentation.
Hello! Today is a great day!
I think although mobile websites will not completely replace what we have now, they will be the device commonly used for browsing.