Free: Create a program on your Windows Phone

Think about it, can you develop a program on your Android?  On your iPhone?  Ummm?  Not to be smug, but as far as I can tell there are copies of the excellent HP RPN calculators, current graphing calculators, but none of them allow you to write programs.  Some people look at Touch Develop and feel it is for High School Students, not me.  As Electrical Engineer, I have used programmable calculators extensively in the field to assist with control systems testing, evaluate mechanical response to electrical signals, and so forth.  Software designers are often out of touch with the true use of their products (good example of not putting Tasks in the first version of Windows Phone 7 Outlook, wow).  This is the type of product that when tied to external sensors, via bluetooth likely, would be widely used by the engineering community.

So there are two potential customers: High School Students and Engineers.  Well there are a lot of similarities between those two groups.

Well, to take a big risk, this blog will actually have a theme: Touch Develop from Microsoft Research.  Actually I like it so much, I wouldn’t mind owning it, but other people created it and I don’t know how to make them give it to me.  So maybe they will be nice and share it with me and you.  Which they will, you download Touch Develop on the Windows Phone 7 for no cost to you.

And yes, Kinect is way cooler than this, but I think that the software will be in way more pockets than your average kinect, since this programming language is completely designed to run on the Windows Phone 7.

Why is this such an important idea?  iPad, iPhone, Android and the other slates like the HP Slate based on WebOS are consuming devices, and in the case of the Apple products they do it quite well, no matter what my opinion of them may be.  One of the things these products don’t do is allow you to customize the environment via programming.  This is a new idea in software and software based products, and Touch Develop is a way to overcome this trend.  Also if you are like me, then not writing simple programs or even more complex programs is a habit, then being in an atmosphere where I have to only consume is difficult.

At the bottom of this post, is a video about the Touch Develop.  Like the TI-Graphing calculators of the past, the Touch Develop allows you to program on a light weight product. 

So to make my life easier, and after isn’t that what the universe needs to do: Make my life easier, and yours as well, I am going to start tomorrow going through and reviewing the apps at https://www.touchdevelop.com, mainly because reviewing the apps is MUCH easier than actually writing the apps.

So zoom over to https://www.touchdevelop.com ,and prove to me that I am not making another career mistake by throwing my support to this excellent product.