Yesterday Yalla Apps contacted with me and asked for an interview. The interview  was conducted to get more insight on the WP7 developer community and thier opinions about different platforms.

Below are my answers to the questions of Yalla Apps

Yalla Apps: Are you a Developer or Designer or both? What is your experience level?

Ali Özgür : I'm a software developer. I currently work for Istanbul Bilgi University, one of the largest privately held university in Turkey, as the Platforms and Services Team Manager. I got BS degree in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University and also hold an MBA degree from Istanbul Bilgi University. I'm developing software for more than 10 years. I've spend most of this time developing on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft developer tools. I've started my software development career working on Motorola MCU software. I've developed software with C++, Delphi, C# and ASP.NET MVC during my 10 year career. I worked on military, education, media, document management, OCR, workflow, Windows CE and mobile projects. I've contributed to some open source projects and in the mean time I maintain my own open source project PragmaSQL.

Yalla Apps: What gets you started on developing for a certain platform? What are all platforms you develop for?

Ali Özgür : Ecosystem of the platform is very important in my opinion. By ecosystem I mean developer tools, platform APIs and SDKs, programming model of the platform, the quality of the hardware running the platform, market share, general profile of the platform users, nice looking appstore There are also some technical parameters I take into consideration. For example providing a unified programming model to developers for different form factors, having strong DRM (Digital Rights Management) to allow just licensed software are some of the technical parameters. 

I'm developing software for Windows platform as part of my regular job with Microsoft .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Under PragmaTouch (my side project) we develop primarily for Apple iOS. Weare also evaluating Android and WP7 and have some demo apps. Personally I've also developed for Windows CE couple of years ago.

Yalla Apps: Would you consider developing for WP7? What you think is missing in WP7 development platform – what is better in others?

Ali Özgür: We are not just considering actually we are actively evaluating WP7 by writing some little demo apps. I think WP7 has a great development platform. First of all you build software for WP7 with the greatest development IDE in the market, in my opinion, which is Visual Studio. You develop with C#, which is the master piece of primarily Anders Hejlsberg and all other great guys at Microsoft. I really love C# as a programming language and when combined with Visual Studio you have the bare minimums to produce a quality software.  WP7 has an emulator not a simulator, the difference is somehow technical but important. As a developer in my opinion others have nothing better than the WP7 development platform. But as a platform for example copy/paste and hardware is better in iOS,

Yalla Apps: Do you think WP7 will play a significant role in mobile OS?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I definitely think that WP7 will play a significant role in mobile. Especially the recent Microsoft-Nokia agreement and the success of the partnership will be very important in determining the place of WP7 in mobile market. Nokia is the biggest mobile manufacturer by quantity and has high market shares in developing countries where demand for new technology is increasing every year. Xbox customers will also play important role during this process since Microsoft has great customer base on this platform.

Yalla Apps: Do you consider learning new technologies for mobile – which ones?

Ali Özgür : Yes, I consider learning new technologies for mobile. HTML5 is the number one in my personal list.

We have just finished development of our new product MoodleTouch (mTouch) and will submit mTouch to the AppStore for review next week after we complete our tests. mTouch is the first and only native IPhone application for Moodle and we are already proud of this achievement. We have made extensive use of our JiraTouch experience both on technical side as well as on customer expectations side. mTouch desktop version was born out of our customer expectations experience gained from JiraTouch. Let me explain the details.

Moodle is an open source system, and has lots of customized installations spread all around the world. Moodle does not offer an API for 3rd party clients so you can not simply access a strictly controlled and neat API which you can develop against. To overcome this limitation we use some visual pattern matching techniques to make Moodle output fit on the IPhone, you can think mTouch as a customized somehow intelligent browser for Moodle which is optimized for IPhone screen size and utilizes IPhone UI best practices. As I said visual aspects of each Moodle installation may vary so that these changes may cause mTouch not to play well with some Moodle installations which in turn will bring unhappy students. Students will be unhappy because they will have hard times if they want to get refund from the AppStore, probably this will not even be possible. Students will also be unhappy because they will not be able to access Moodle on a trip and post to a forum which will be closed in just a few minutes. From our side mTouch will be interpreted as an application which works on some Moodle sites but not on others which means bad fame.

So we decided to provide a free Windows version of mTouch so that students can download and play to see if mTouch works properly with their Moodle installation and experience the mTouch capabilities and afterwards decide to buy or not. We did not choose to publish a light/free limited version of mTouch because we want the students to experience all of the mTouch functions before they buy the application.

Check out MoodleTouch site for details

Download mTouch for Windows version

Contact us for more information

We have been busy developing our new baby JiraTouch for the last 3 months. It has been a tough journey with lots of unknowns and new things. Platform was new, development tools were new and the team was new. The only knowns were Jira and the C# language. I would like to share some of my observations in this blog post.

What is JiraTouch?

You can read JiraTouch features to learn more about JiraTouch.

You can watch video tutorials to see JiraTouch in action.

You can buy JiraTouch from AppStore.

Jira and SOAP API

No need to talk about the quality of Jira software on its own. But I'm sorry that Jira SOAP API is not as complete as the product itself. The most serious problem is the versioning dilemma of the SOAP API. SOAP API is introduced since Jira version 3.0 but over the time (Recent version is Jira 4.01) there have been lots of changes with the API. Change is normal and we do not expect all aspects shall be covered at once, since the product itself matures and changes so does the SOAP API. But I would be more happy if Jira guys developed a good API versioning strategy with good API change documentation. For example with no specific versioning information included in the wsdl you get different properties for the same Type. One perfect example is RemoteComment type, this type has changed dramatically through Jira versions. Here are examples of the WSDL for different jira versions

This snippet is from the wsdl of a Jira 3.6 installation

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