It’s been three weeks since I received my newNokia Lumia 900 and I thought I’d give some feedback from the perspective of a few weeks out. As a reminder, I previously used a Samsung Focus as my daily driver. I previously blogged about this phone in my pseudo-review. Pros I really have gotten used to the buttons all being on the same side of the phone. It took some effort to re-acquaint myself with the lock/unlock button being in the middle of the phone but it’s second nature now.…

While working on a new app, I came upon a scenario in which I wanted the phone to support both Portrait and Landscape orientations, but I didn’t want the content on the page to rotate. I wanted the user to feel that they had rotated the phone, but the particulars of my app would make rotating the content nonsensical. What advantages are there for this? First, from the user perspective, if your app has an app bar and supports multiple orientations, the app bar rotates the icons and the menu items fly in from the sides.…

One important aspect of accessing SimpleDB on a Windows Phone directly is that it isn’t going through another service that can handle securing the credentials needed to access SimpleDB. SimpleDB, like most (if not all) AWS services, requires two pieces of information to secure a request of the service: AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key. These are two pieces of data that I would rather not put on a device that people carry around with them.…

Almost immediately after writing the code to connect to the SimpleDB, I started running into HTTP error codes. No 200’s for me. Since my code is directly working with HttpWebRequest objects and their corresponding HttpWebResponse objects, I could just look through the response object and its properties to see what went wrong. But if you want to see what actually went over the wire, both on the way out and back in, there’s such a better way to do it.…

The first thing to know about the SDK provided by Amazon for .NET (AWSSDK) is that it does not work on Windows Phone. You can’t reference the DLL because it hasn’t been compiled as a phone class library. If you try to put the source code in and compile it yourself, it won’t compile. This is because the SDK contains a lot of code that just doesn’t exist in the subset of .…

The sheer amount of options that developers have is staggering. Software language, platform, and frameworks are all big choices that developers have to make. And they think they love it. They think that they’re in a smorgasbord of choice and that it’s the greatest thing ever. But it’s not. What they don’t realize is that if they had fewer choices, their code would be better, the end product will be better, and they’ll be happier.…

Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) is a huge upgrade for Windows Phone users. There’s a crazy number of new features and it’s hard to pick just five. But let’s try, shall we? Twitter Integration This is totally what I wanted from Twitter integration on Mango. I love being able to easily post photos from the camera directly to Twitter, update my status from the “Me” tile, and read tweets from single contacts or groups of contacts right on the front page.…

I’d like to officially take the wraps off the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango app that I’ve been working on for the past couple months and introduce you to thePomodoro Timer for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. For those who don’t know, a pomodoro timer is the basis of a time management system introduced by Francesco Cirillo back in the 1980s. You can read more about it www.pomodorotechnique.com. The general idea is that you set a timer for 25 minutes and focus on one task only for those 25 minutes.…

This confused me a little bit from the get go, but it turns out I had made it harder on myself without realizing it. When I turned on the Twitter integration on Windows Phone Mango, the first thing I noticed is that now my people tile was full of contact photos from Twitter. I don’t follow that many people (136), but all those people were now filling my contacts list. Just imaging what yours will look like!…

Update: see my article on my favorite mango features for consumers. My first Windows Phone 7 app was an internal project not meant for general distribution. I was excited to use my existing skills on a new platform. But soon after starting that project, I ran into a number of hurdles. Some were surprises, some were expected. After seeing Mango demos at MIX 11, I knew that, going forward, developing was going to be much more pleasant.…