Developer sings the praises of Windows Phone

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imagePublication StartupSmart has spoken to Xamling director and Project Tripod chief technical officer Jordan Knight about the company’s experience developing for Windows Phone.

Xamling is one of Australia’s leading independent Windows Phone developers, and has built apps for  Microsoft, Nokia, SBS, Telstra and Foxtel. It also built the recently released startup app Project Tripod, which is exclusively available on Windows Phone.

“We’ve worked on all the major platforms including iOS (Objective C is the language and XCode is the development tool), Android (Java is the language and Eclipse the development tool) and Windows (C# and Visual Studio),” Knight says.

“Visual Studio and C# is by far the most advanced and user friendly of all of them. Even a lot of developers on iOS prefer using Visual Studio with Xamarin (which allows Cross Platform Development for iOS and Android on Windows).

He also said development was cheaper and faster for Windows Phone by a large measure.

“Our small team constantly outpaces and outprices far larger teams on the other platforms,” he continued.

Amongst the platform’s advantages, according to Knight, is a “super-straight forward and relatively quick”, process for getting apps in the Windows Play store that has seen most of Xamling’s apps reviewed within a week.

“Microsoft and Nokia are also very good at helping out promoting great apps. They have already [promoted] the recently released Project Tripod as the worldwide featured app of the day in the Windows Phone store [on April 30],” Knight says.

“Windows Phone apps can also be built cross-platform to run on Windows 8 as well with a lot of code reuse. The apps can also be built in such a way where their code can be re-used on iOS and Android (which is not true if built in Objective C or Java).

“Windows Phone has better hardware for taking photos (Nokia 1020 for example) and the Nokia Imaging SDK (which is free) makes it super easy to do all sorts of advanced image manipulation).”

Knight finishes with some advice for people looking to create an app for the Windows Phone platform.

“Learn to use Visual Studio’s and C#’s cross platform capabilities to build apps that work on Windows Phone, Windows 8, iOS and Android all at once… the other native developers and your competition will not be able to keep up. Oh, and get a good designer that understands the modern user interface.”

Does Knight’s experience echo that of our other readers who are also developers? Let us know below.

More about the topics: developers, windows phone

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