I like the possibilities that NativeClient in Chrome will open up, but I can't help think that we're going backwards... Do you remember when we used to see "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" and other crazy stuff written on websites?

Surely with Chrome/NaCl we're just going to end up with "This game/app only works in Google Chrome with NativeClient". This doesn't seem like a good thing for anyone (devs or consumers). We were just starting to get web standards right, with cross-platform coding easier than it's ever been.

I think it's highly unlikely that other browser makers will add NaCl. Certainly not Microsoft - it just makes Chrome, Chromebooks, ChromeOS more attractive to their Windows customers. I don't think they'll want to help that cause!

I love the Chromebook because it's designed for the web. It's apps are cross-browser/platform by design. It's not like Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, etc., where all the "default" apps are locked to the OS. My biggest problem with the recent take off in mobile computing is that apps are tied to the OS. This just isn't right. I should be able to pick an OS based on my preferences, and not lose all my apps, or have a restricted choice of what I can run. ChromeOS will only run things written in an open standard that work on every other common consumer OS. Do we really want to destroy this?

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of being able to run near native code over the web is an *excellent* idea. Web-based apps solve so many problems with deployment, updates, security, etc., and being able to run performant apps in the same way is great. However, we need something open for the web, not another thing Google have gone away and built on their own and try to force upon others (just look at Wave, Dart, etc.). If they intend for NaCl to be in all browsers, then it needs to be developed openly with input from all parties, not just sprung on the world (note: I don't know if this is their intention).

Is NaCl just going to be the new ActiveX?

Update: A few days after posting this, I had a call with Brandon Watson, Director, Dev Platform & Ecosystem and Ben Lower, Senior Product Manager, Dev Platform & Ecosystem. I've posted a little update here.

Note: This is a pretty long post, but it's the only way to get across why I'm suddenly so disappointed in Windows Phone 7 - a platform I've been so excited about for so long. I really hope someone on the WP7 team takes the time to read it to the end. I'm probably not unique in having these feelings.

It's a harsh title, so first, a little background...

I've been waiting for Windows Phone 7 for around 10 years. Really! See what I did there? :)

In 2001 I finished my A-Levels and got a job as a web programmer. I lived with my parents and had plenty of cash to wastespend. One of the first gadgets I bought was a Compaq iPaq. I convinced myself that it was really useful, and that it saved me lots of time, but in reality, it was horrid. The Windows operating system was slow and sluggish and the usability was pretty awful. I had to buy a sleeve that made the device twice as thick and a huge WiFi card just to allow it to connect to anything. It was crap, but I loved it anyway.

When Microsoft released the .NET Compact Framework, I was so excited. I could now write my own applications to run on this device that would fit in my pocket. Awesome! Except, it wasn't. The device was still a pain in the ass to use and the performance still sucked. The ideas were great. The execution was terrible.

It wasn't long before I picked up an XDA, so I no longer had to carry both a mobile phone and a PDA. Good times! Or not. The mobile version of Windows was still pretty bad.

Over the coming years, I bought practically every Windows mobile device I could afford. I lived in hope that this new device would be nice and snappy, and Microsoft will have improved the OS and added functionality. It never happened, but it didn't stop me throwing money at them each time, in hope.

Fast forward a few more years, and I'd been playing with Managed DirectX. The idea of programming games in C# was pretty exciting. Ultimately this became XNA, and the Zune wasn't far behind. I really wanted a Zune, but the UK launch was delayed and delayed, and ultimately never happened.

When Apple released the iPhone, I started to wonder if the reason we hadn't seen a Zune in the UK was that Microsoft were holding back to release a ZunePhone. Despite waiting and waiting, this didn't happen.

During this time (since 2001), my career was built on building web applications in Microsoft technologies. My life is well and truly in the Microsoft camp. I love .NET, I love C# and I love Visual Studio. It made me die a little inside every time I had to do some work in PHP or fire up Eclipse...

However... In 2008, I ditched my Windows-based XDA and bought an iPhone. Sorry Microsoft, I'd been waiting for 7 years, and you still hadn't delivered.

I loved my iPhone. It made me sad that there was no competition from Microsoft. I even started working on iPhone apps. I really hate Mac OSX, Objective-C, and XCode. But I had to go with the market.

Imagine how excited I was when Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7! I can ditch this Apple nonsense and develop applications in C#, Visual Studio, XNA, Silverlight! Finally, Microsoft are putting their weight into a promising mobile platform. Despite previous failures, this time, I have hope that they can really do it.

Through my company, I was able to get access to a developer WP7 device from Microsoft. The hardware was a little shoddy, but the OS was very promising. Everything was looking good!

I'd convinced my company we should be working on a Windows Phone 7 version of our iPhone apps, and I resisted picking up an iPhone4 because Windows Phone 7 was the way forward. I kept my eyes open for a UK launch date in the hope it wouldn't overlap with my holiday in Orlando, so I could get one right away. As luck would have it, the launch was announced as a few weeks before my holiday!

This is where it started to go wrong...

As we got closer to launch, I noticed there seemed to be a huge lack of advertising. I started to doubt whether the launch would be met at all. I started calling around local stores, and nobody knew anything about the launch. WTF? How can they not know about Microsoft's competitor to the iPhone?! I popped into a Carphone Warehouse over the road from the office where I work on launch day. The staff knew nothing about WP7. I called all the local Orange stores, hoping for a HTC Mozart. Nobody knew when, or if, they would be getting any Windows Phone 7 devices. Wow.

I wasn't giving up that easily, so I spent the next few weeks (getting close to my Orlando holiday) trying to track down a device. Eventually, I found that a local O2 store had HTC HD7s in stock. I rushed down there, and managed to convince them to sell me one as Pay-As-You-Go (since I'm on, and very happy with, giffgaff). I was made up! Windows Phone 7 was awesome. Just being able to pin a tile for my wife and see calendar appointments on the homescreen was enough for me to purchase it over an iPhone!

Then I went on holiday to Orlando. I took loads of geo-tagged pics, and was genuinely really impressed with the phone. Congratulations Microsoft. You've finally done it. But still, where is all the fanfare? You need to show people how awesome this phone is - then you'll sell bucket-loads!

As time went on, cracks started to show. There were bugs. Many bugs. At one point, the SMS message store for my wife got corrupt, which meant I couldn't send, or read, text messages to/from her. I got in touch with the UK WP7 developer advocate that had sorted out the developer phone for my company, and explained the issue. After many emails going back and forth I was told that there may be logs on my phone that would help Microsoft track down this issue but security procedures do not allow them to share a tool to get the logs off my device. I was instead, told to try a factory reset. This fixed the issue, but Microsoft were no closer to finding/fixing the bug.

Another pretty annoying bug was that the bluetooth randomly disconnects from my car. Frequently. About every 2-3 minutes. If I'm on a call when this happens, the call stays open, but just normally via the handset in my pocket. As you can imagine - I can't hear the person at the other end, and they can't hear me. 10-20 seconds later, it reconnects, and the call continues.

Because I preferred coding in VS/C# so much, I started work on a Windows Phone 7 game in my spare time. I even got a few colleagues to join in by creating their own games, as part of an XNA coding competition. Most of these guys had never even coded C#, never mind written a game!

My game is called Badger Quest, and currently has a few playable levels. There are no videos online yet, but you can see how it looks from the background on the Twitter page. It'll be pretty similar to Mario, though played by tapping buttons on the screen to use your abilities (jump, turn, throw, slash, etc.) which are limited in number.

As time went by, I started to have doubts. WP7 handsets weren't selling very well. The marketplace was buggy (eg. returns to the "Xbox LIVE" filter when you press "Back" from looking at an "indie" game). I started to wonder how seriously Microsoft were taking their platform. The OS was great, but how they responded to initial feedback and bug reports (and how quickly) would ultimately decide the fate of the platform.

With a huge outcry over the lack of Copy & Paste, Microsoft announced there would be an update in January that would add this. Excellent - if we don't get the bugfixes before then, they'll be in that update. All will be good.

Sadly, it wasn't good. The update was delayed. And delayed. There was zero transparency from Microsoft. Despite the rest of the company making huge strides in this area over the previous few years, Windows Phone 7 is a quiet, closed box. Nobody knew what was happening with the update, and more importantly, the bug fixes.

Eventually, an update started to roll out. Yay! Only, we quite quickly discovered it wasn't NoDo. It was a pre-update update. An update that updates the update system. Why couldn't this just be bundled with NoDo?! More annoying was that Microsoft didn't announce this update until after they started pushing it. They told us nothing about what it did.

Then it got worse. One of my colleagues was prompted to install his update. He connected his phone as described, and the update started. Then it failed. It gave an error saying his phone was not updated, and could not be rolled back. He tried all sorts of resets, with no luck. His phone was bricked. As I'd been one of the people that had suggested he get a WP7, I felt pretty bad. He spent the next day being bounced between Microsoft, Virgin and Samsung, trying to get his phone working. During this time, he could not use his phone in any way. The staff at Virgin and Samsung knew very little about WP7 and more specifically, this update. Eventually, Virgin agreed to send him a new handset.

Fast forward a few more days, and we're all still waiting for NoDo, and our bugfixes. It's been over four months and we've still had zero bugfixes. Rumours start spreading across the web that NoDo has been delayed. Again, it takes a week before Microsoft finally come out and tell us what's going on.

Hopefully if you've read this far, you now know why I'm starting to have serious doubts about Windows Phone 7. If Microsoft can't turn around bugfixes in a timely fashion, what's going to happen when people start finding exploits (and they will find exploits)?

Of course, if I'm not confident in the platform as a user, I can't be as a developer. I've put my Windows Phone 7 development on hold. I can't commit to spending more time on a platform that Microsoft seems to be sending the way of previous versions. I still believe the OS is excellent, but sadly, that's only half the battle.

I'm not giving up, just yet. I truly believe Windows Phone 7 can be something brilliant, but there are definitely issues that need addressing. To show how seriously I believe Microsoft could make this work, I've applied to go and work for the Windows Phone team via the Microsoft Careers website. If Microsoft want to make Windows Phone 7 better, here's an offer for another set of hands to test the platform. I'm serious - I'd relocate from the UK to the US to help work on making Windows Phone 7 better, because I think it could have a strong future.

A few months ago, I posted about (and updated) the news of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace separating "managed portfolio" games (eg. those that have relationships with Microsoft - generally the bigger games developers) and "indie games" (created by you and I). I was concerned that the lack of XBLIG sales would continue in the WP7 world. Now that the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is live in the Zune 4.7 software, I thought I'd post an update on how things turned out.

When first entering the apps section of the marketplace, the intro screen is comprised of four sections. The top one (largest) looks like a list of Microsoft-chosen list of apps, similar to Apple's featured/staff picks section. Just undernearth, slightly smaller, is a "We recommend" section. It's not entirely clear what the difference is here - it's possible that this is just one list, and the top four simply get bigger icons. It's not clear whether either of these may ever contain indie games, though I'll try to get clarification. The remaining two sections are top selling lists, which do include indie games, one of which can be seen in the screenshot below.

The landing screen is not restricted to games, so for the games section, you'd click the "games" option on the left side of the screen. This brings you to the games section, which can be filtered to All, Paid, Free, Xbox LIVE. Notice that the default section is Xbox LIVE. This section is restricted to managed portfolio games, which all have full access to the LIVE APIs. You can easily identify these games by the "XBOX LIVE" banner at the top of the icons.

Clicking the "all" option, will give you a full list of all Windows Phone 7 games. There are subgenres in the bottom left, but this list contains both managed portfolio games, and indie games. Hurrah! No navigating to the indie bin!

Clicking the "paid" option, takes you to a section that is exactly the same as the "all" option, but shows only games that cost. Again, indie games sit side-by-side with managed portfolio games here.

Clicking the "free" option, as expected, takes you to the same again, but shows only games that a free to download. Again, indie games sit side-by-side with managed portfolio games here.

Conclusion

In summary, I think this is an excellent structure. Defaulting to the Xbox LIVE games is a great choice for consumers, and outside of this section, it looks like indie games are treated equally. This eliminates all concerns I had, and I can't wait to finish Badger Quest and get it up there!

Rob Hutchinson, a talented programmer I used to work with, from nullcity.com has just release a game called Breeze on the Xbox LIVE Indie Marketplace. It was built using Kitae, his 2D XNA Game Engine. I'm really impressed with how this game turned out, and I think it's going to do really well in the marketplace. I thought I'd plug it here, as I know many readers are XNA coders :-)

• Breeze official website
• Breeze on Xbox LIVE Marketplace

With the iPhone app I've been working on nearing completion, and Windows Phone 7 + XNA 4.0 in sight, I recently decided to get back into game creation. I've previously released a game on Xbox LIVE Indie Games, Jungle Blocks, but it wasn't very good, because I was somewhat excited about the idea of my game being live, and pushed the button before it was really finished.

So, here I am again. Take 2. This time, I want to finish something. A game to be proud of! It doesn't matter how long it takes to finish, I've already done the whole XBLIG thing, so I aim to take my time and do it right.

In order to keep me motivated, I decided to encourage my colleagues to get involved, by declaring a games programming competition. Until now, nobody else at work really knew XNA, so by getting others involved, there will be people to talk to and discuss ideas with. To encourage people to join in, even if they have other priorities, we set a 6 month deadline and set down minimal ground rules. To keep things fair, we decided:

• Games must be legally publishable - e.g. no copyright material
• No paid-for assets

We didn't define a platform/technology, to allow for iPhone, Android and other platforms, but as it turned out, all but one participant decided on XNA :-)

It would be kinda lame for someone outside our company to win the competition, so I'm afraid you guys are official excluded. However, if you're interested in learning something new, I encourage you guys to lay down a similar challenge at your workplaces. If you do, be sure to let me know - I'd be interested to see how other people get on with the same challenge :-)

I was toying with the idea of creating "Jungle Blocks 2" for the Windows Phone 7, since it wouldn't be hard to do, and if it was ready for WP7 launch, it could probably make a few quid before the marketplace fills up. However, because I have a (small, but real) advantage over my colleagues (having used XNA before) and because a few of them are ambitious enough to be doing 3D, I feel somewhat pressured into not being a wuss with a 2D game...

So, my plan is now to build a small 3D RPG for the Xbox, something not too different to Zelda 64 or Mario 64 (though on a much smaller scale ;-)). I've not really played with 3D, so this feels like enough of a challenge that I'll learn a ton of stuff, but simple enough that I (hopefully) won't just abandon it half-way through (something I may have a reputation for...).

Over the coming months, I'll blog about what I'm doing as I go. I can't promise I won't give up and go back to a 2D Jungle Blocks, but at least if I do, I can say I tried!