MOBILE AND iPHONE: Check Out: Visioning Apple’s netbook futures

Microsoft will be throwing plenty of dough around to prevent that. Speaking of which, I got a laugh at the hand Microsoft’s legal dept.

Here was a note in the case study:

Luke ran into an issue with hardware variations in the end device. The expectation was that the application would run on both devices; however, the latter Windows Mobile release on the HTC Touch Pro was a significant improvement over the HTC Touch Diamond 2. Most other issues with similar devices centered on the display and required that all layout and alignment code be changed to be device independent and take into consideration the screen resolution. Once this was set, the device displayed the layout accordingly. The expectation is that this should translate quite nicely between different devices.

My guess here is that this is called an “expectation” because there are so many Windows Mobile devices and makers that one or more might not be compatible. Could it be?

At the Windows Team Blog, Community Product Manager Constanze Roman makes some even wilder statements:

In his conclusion, Thompson credits the Windows Mobile Developer Community for helping him resolve the issues he encountered along the road, stating that: “The large development community, both within Microsoft and outside, and the various whitepapers, blogs, virtual labs, websites, and other online documentation, offered a wealth of information that provided direction and greatly facilitated problem resolution. The only real challenge was assuring total portability between screens, and that was assured by utilizing the concept of aspect ratios.”

I have no doubt saying that Luke Thompson never “said” that statement. These were the words of the corporate flak or hired writer who crafted the case study. No human being outside of a PR or Marketing department ever uses the word “utilizing.” Or “wealth of information.” Or “greatly facilitated.”

I found two actual quotes from Thompson in the case study. The first was about developing in C# over Objective C.

“What I’m finding is that it’s harder to mess up with C# than in Objective-C, which is used for iPhone application development. This makes any extra effort needed to customize the classes I want worthwhile,” commented Luke Thompson, Gripwire software engineer porting the Amplitude application.

Of course, he’s more familiar with C#.

The second was about the IDE interface. He likes Visual Studio and said its integration with the interface tools was better than the Apple Xcode setup.

Luke commented, “The ease and speed of development was illustrated by putting together four different interface screens simultaneously. With Apple, this activity is really jumbled and you need to jump between numerous applications.”