This post is more of a retrospective on developing TaskTask for Windows Phone than anything else. If you aren’t interested in such things, don’t worry about reading it. The good news is that as of today 1/2/2012, I’ve submitted TaskTask to the Marketplace for approval. If all goes well, TaskTask for Windows Phone should be available in a week.
It seems like I’ve been working on a Windows Phone version of TaskTask almost forever. I started the project in February 2011 and I’ve been slowly chipping away on getting it to the marketplace. Most of the core logic for TaskTask was in place by April 2011, but mastering a good user experience on Windows Phone took a long time. There was a learning curve with XAML, a huge database performance issue with SQLite on WP that basically prevented delivery of the app, many limitations of the platform, and a number of life events that occurred throughout the summer that kept me away from my computer.
However, Windows Phone Mango provided built-in database support, and in time I’ve learned how to navigate XAML to produce better looking applications. I’ve spent the better part of the last week while I’ve been on “vacation” working away, checking in more than 100 features and bug fixes over the last two weeks. TaskTask for Windows Phone is finally in a shape I consider ready to ship!
For those of you wondering why I’m bringing TaskTask to Windows Phone, there are a couple of reasons: new technology is always exciting for me and Windows Phone is the newest out there, and Windows Phone is a relatively solid platform built on C#, which allowed me to produce produce a code base in C# that I could leverage for other platforms through the Mono efforts.
Now that I’ve completed a huge re-write of TaskTask, I’ll continue working on updating the iPhone, iPad, and Windows Phone versions of the app. Over time I expect to unify the feature set between all platforms, while still providing an app experience worth of each device. I’ve also set my sights on Android as the next target, and will begin investigating how to take the large C# library I’ve written for TaskTask into the Android world with Mono for Android.
