The Tablet Show

Wow - 100 shows! Carl and Richard think back over the past two years of Tablet Shows, from October 2011 to September 2013. What's changed and what's remained the same? Any breakthroughs? Any surprises? Any idea what's going to happen 100 shows from now? Thanks for listening - we couldn't do it without you! Make sure you activate your Windows Azure credits in your MSDN Subscription! You could win an Aston Martin!

Carl and Richard talk to Jason Ostrander about his experiences building Android tablet applications. The conversation starts out talking about the differences of building in Java on the desktop versus mobile and tablet devices - being far more resource constrained and performance sensitive. Jason also digs into his experiences with Android OS fragmentation, as well as building the software that ships with the Barnes and Noble Nook device. The Android ecosystem is alive and well, and there's lots of stuff to build!

Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Freeley and Alan O'Connor about their experiences building Road Buddy for Windows Phone 8. Road Buddy uses the GPS and accelerometer data from the phone to determine if you are in a car accident and contact emergency services with your location, nature of the impact and medical information. Jeremy and Alan talk about how they built the application, the challenges in integrating via text message with emergency services, their involvement with Imagine Cup and a whole host of other issues around getting to market with a cool mobile application.

Carl and Richard talk to Bart Read and Kevin Boyle about building hybrid mobile apps using Cordova. Cordova is the Apache open source version of PhoneGap, which was purchased by Adobe a few years back. The conversation digs into a variety of products built to utilize Cordova, all with the goal of making it easier to build mobile and tablet applications across multiple platforms with one code base.

Carl and Richard talk to Ben Buttigieg about building Nokia Music. Ben talks about working with Nokia to bring a great music service to market for both Windows Phone and Windows 8. The conversation digs into the public APIs available to build your own applications on the platforms that utilize the metadata and music services of Nokia Music.

Carl and Richard talk to Chris Hardy from Xamarin about his experience building an application for Windows Phone and then migrating it to iPhone and Android. Chris talks about his Days Until Xmas app he first built for Windows Phone. The conversation digs into the differences in building UI between the different phones (it's harder than you think!) and what code can actually be shared between projects. Chris has put the iOS version of the app up on GitHub so you can take it out for a spin!

Carl and Richard talk to Jim McKeeth about programming in Delphi to build tablet applications for iOS. Yeah, that Delphi? What, you thought it went away? Delphi has changed hands a couple of times, but has continued to evolve and work with modern development practices, Internet technologies, etc. Jim describes the entire development environment, how you can build native iOS apps with the tools, and soon to build Android apps as well! Could Delphi be the enterprise tablet development solution?

Carl and Richard talk to Jeff Morgan about testing mobile applications. Jeff references his Lean Dog book Cucumber and Cheese - a Testers Workshop. The conversation starts out with the idea of Acceptance Test Driven Development, involving not just testers and developers, but all the stakeholders, including domain experts, operations people and more! Jeff talks about Gherkin, the near-natural language for describing requirements (and tests) not only in English, but 40 other languages! While the focus is on mobile testing, all testing is well served by the idea of acceptance focus.

Carl and Richard talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his experiences building mobile applications - first! The conversation starts out with the challenges of making mobile web applications that work well. Web pages have gotten too large to load quickly or render effectively, HTTP Archive says in 2013 the average page size is 1.2MB! Shawn digs into how to architect a page so that it sends down the mobile version first, fast and light for a phone, but also usable on a regular browser, and then load additional resources if the browser is capable. Great discussions on dealing with retina displays and bandwidth restrictions as well. Time to evolve your web page design!

Carl and Richard talk to Rob Daigneau about building backend services for mobile applications. The conversation starts out talking about service design patterns, the different approaches to creating services so that they are reliable, scalable and performance. Rob digs into the differences between SOAP/WSDL and REST, TCP and UDP and more. Many of these technologies are years old now, but today in the mobile-first world they're hugely important. The tools are getting better!

At NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Gill Cleeren about his experiences building a Windows 8 tablet application for Belgian television. The conversation starts out talking about the specifics of the application, available for iOS and Android as well. Gill talks about the challenges of implementing DRM in Windows 8 (as compared to Silverlight) and mentions the Microsoft Media Player Framework as a good starting point. From there the discussion digs into the challenges of the cable companies in distributing content, how piracy factors into the business and the risk of disintermediation - how to stay relevant in a ever more connected, global world.

While at NDC, Carl and Richard talk to Laurent Bugnion about his experiences building tablet applications. Laurent and his company have been building tablet and mobile applications for a variety of companies over the past few years. The conversation starts out on tools, talking about C#/XAML vs. WinJS development (C# is winning) and the focus of Windows 8.1 support. Laurent also talks about the success of the Portable Class Libraries, Xamarin support for C# in iOS and Android and more.

While at DevTeach, Carl and Richard started out recording a panel discussion on the state of mobile development in a bar... but it was too noisy. So the actual panel part of the discussion moved to a quiet part of the hotel. The panelists talk about the differences between developing for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Everyone was pro-native, so the web development discussion part was short. Comparing and contrasting the different app stores was good fun also. The state of mobile development of strong!

Carl and Richard talk to Colin Bowern about his experiences developing web applications in the enterprise. Colin talks about how web got into the enterprise in the first place, and how far behind most enterprises are with their web applications. And yes, IE6 gets mentioned. The conversation digs into the strengths and weaknesses of building mobile and tablet applications using web vs. native, as well as other enterprise considerations like security and policy models. Is web really enterprise ready? Colin thinks so!

Carl and Richard circle back with the great Billy Hollis about UX design. The conversation starts out with a discussion on styling specific to the mobile OS vs. styling by brand. From there, Billy digs into different design concepts, discussing the value of metaphors that help users understand your software's behavior. There is design everywhere, you just have to learn to see it!