Overview

I have an HTC Win Mo 6.5 phone with the latest Opear and IE on it. Ready to test!

A little late again, I know SQL, Java, VB.net, very very basic C++

I can help testing. HTC Desire HD (2.2 Froyo).

Hi I can help testing as well. Iphone and English but have access to blackberry and a few others to test as well. Alan

I hope I'm not too late to help out if I can, I have VB experience, some Javascript. Fully aware these will not help but might be of use, just put me where needed!

Looks like Apple have done a bit of a reversal of their heavy handed stranglehold on development environments for their phone/pad Apple relaxes iOS development tool restrictions, app review guidelines released This should bode well for code shareing between ports so long as they don't decide to pull any other stunts.

I want to default view to be subscribed threads (all or unread if possible to "really" detect whether I've not read it!) (Nice to have as a widget!) and then button to link to all posts in reverse time order (e.g "Todays Posts") Alerts as main forum for PMs And easy way to make simple reply to a thread.

Just starting developing an Android app - never used Java before but dabbled with C++ (plugins for VirtualDub and Avisynth) - developed a PHP Helpdesk, written a Facebook App (Just for friends/familiy use )

@nephilim - Unless they are doing a web service component then I don't think that they cover the same ground. A local app will allow for a full experience on a mobile device and be able to offer features that would simply not be feasible on a majority of mobile devices via html/java. It also has the ability to allow for much less data transfer when checking stuff mobily which is important for speed and makes it more affordable and practical for those of us stuck in stone age countries where mobile data can be $1/MB. Depending on the API made avalible this could also mean clientside caching further speeding up the experience and limiting the cost. All it would take is a last retrived attribute in the request for any changing list like the iSpy system currently uses and it would lower both the load on the server and the load on the device. You are right that it will take a chunk of coding on both sides server and client but for most devices it does seem as there would be a reasonable amount of code portability for stuff like the logic, the UI and low level communication side may need to be customized per OS but this is doable as the code should be tiered anyway. @plexer - as the central code should be tiered out in a way that makes it as portable as possible it should hopefully not be to difficult to port it to other platforms that support the right kinds of development languages. Symbion appears to be programmed in C++ and while there were toolkits and apps for C# support they appear to have stoped being supported. This may make the port more challenging but if there are some symbion os users out there with the skillset the code once written for one platform should be a good basis for a port.

I think the people behind VBulliten are actually designing web interfaces for mobiles as we speak, so I personally think its best to stall until its done. An APP is going to require a tremendous amount of coding for each system, so why not let them do the work for us!

No symbian?

Scrolling across, however thinking about it, the names would be easier, but would have to be smaller on the font at the top.

So any news as to how development is going to work on this? Like the look of the interface by the way, just not sure how the avatar display will work when there are a lot of people logged in?

The 4 images are online users avatars...I picked 4 things from the web at random and "appled" them for the purpose of te images...however names can just as easily be done...

I know there was some hate on it from some partys but how about something along the lines of the 'Metro' layout that Windows Mobile 7 implements. Flowing from left to right going further into the detail. The start screen would have the base options like forums, PMs, Blogs, Subscriptions etc. defaultable to your favorite. These would then flow across to the content housed under each. Stuff like the PMs, subscriptions and blogs could have a new counter on the main screen to alert you to new stuff just like the alerts option on the forum. Will attempt to do a mock up later when I am not reinstalling a bunch of machines and a server

What're the 4 pictures above the forums?

Having spoken a few times with Zero Hour, I have developed some photoshops of a "common" interface, which can be changed to suit either droid, iphone or blackberry. the 2 that I have come up so far, are attached below. http://www.taylorsdesigns.co.uk/Loginscreen.pnghttp://www.taylorsdesigns.co.uk/foruminterface.png

I still have an HTC S730 with WM6 Standard and a HTC Touch Pro 2 with WM6.1 Pro which I could use for testing.

well C# (for Apple products) or a combination of C# and Java (for Droid/WP7) would be the obvious choice. The best way to get them similar is to design the interface first, then duplicate it as required and code up for each specific one. That way the interfaces can be identical, but the backend suits the needs for the phones.

Hi Just to let you all know that things havent stalled. I have been looking into the big 3 SDK's (apple,droid,wp7) and evaluating various options for each and trying to come up with some sort of the common interface for this all. I am also getting sorted with the various app stores that edugeek needs to buy to allow us to publish it to you all. I am away from Thurs till Tuesday so there wont be any updates over the weekend but I am hoping to get rough app gui's for you all to gander at soon. So far wp7 is by far the best to dev on, VS simply rocks tbh along with c# but droid is not bad and iphone is hell. One thing to watch/consider is monodroid which novell is expected to release this summer/august which could be very nice for the droid app as it appears most of us love c# (who coudnt) I am not sure about the situation with monotouch (the iphone c# engine) after all the anty-adobe junk apple pulled but that team has requested info from apple to hopefully clarify if those apps will be allowed (good luck with that) I will update you all again next week when I get back and we can get underway with a private forum for dev work too. Cheers all

I think the first thing we need to do is decide what the future API for connecting to the website backend will contain. Once we have an API planned (and whether or not the implementation is finished) we can then move on to some form of interface planning (I'm currently playing with SketchFlow in Expression Blend so as to knock up a basic interface design idea or 2), and then from that we could look at creating apps for the various platforms - dependant on who feels strongest with which platform/language. Personally, I'm thinking that keeping the apps as similar as possible would be a good idea - that way there's no arguing over why one platform has a feature that another doesn't etc... Thoughts?

A lovely shiny Win Mobo 6.1 with HTC Opera, latest Opera and IE on it

Haven't got the link at the moment, but Google Droid Draw, it's a visual app designer that generates the necessary XML for the form you design

Application Fundamentals | Android Developers Seems to cover the basics for what we need. It would also appear that most of the code is a hash of XML, VBS and PHP

oh, and a blackberry curve, if we're even considering blackberry's at this point.