Writing applications for Windows Phone and iOS

There are a lot of documentation about porting applications from IOS to Windows Phone, but in this article I'm going to start with the premise of writing new applications from scratch for both platforms. I'm not going to make a value judgment on the merits of either of these platforms. Instead, I have a pragmatic approach to writing application reports and describe the similarities and differences between the two platforms when writing applications.

As a member of the Windows Phone team, I am passionate about the Windows Phone platform, but the focus of this article is not to say that one platform is superior to the other, but that the platform is different and therefore requires a number of different programming methods. Although you can use the Monotouch system to write IOS applications in C #, that is a niche environment. In this article, I use standard Xcode and objective-c to write IOS applications and write Windows Phone applications in Visual Studio and C #.

Target User Experience

My goal is to achieve the same user experience on the two platform versions of the application, while ensuring that each version is faithful to the model and philosophy of the target platform. To illustrate what I mean, consider the Windows Phone version of your application to implement the main user interface with a vertical scrolling list box, while the IOS version uses a horizontal scrollviewer to implement the main user interface. Obviously, these differences are just software aspects, that is, I can write a vertical scrolling list in IOS and write a horizontal scrolling list in Windows Phone. Enforcing these preferences would be less faithful to the design of their platform, but I would like to avoid this "unnatural behavior".

Application SeaVan shows the four land border crossings between Seattle and Canada's Vancouver British Columbia, Prov., and the waiting time for each border crossing. This application extracts data from government websites in the United States and Canada via HTTP, refreshes data manually through a button, or automatically refreshes data through a timer.

The two implementations are shown in Figure 1. You'll notice that one difference is that the Windows Phone version has a theme-aware feature and uses the current accent text color. In contrast, the IOS version has no theme or accent color concept.

Figure 1 Application SeaVan The main user interface screen on the iPhone and Windows phone devices