Developer Interview: Damian Karzon

Developer Interview

We've been joined by Damian Karzon, the developer (DK Development) backside BoxShot (Windows Phone customer for Dropbox), for this calendar week's interview. Head on past the break for the insightful answers provided on platform evolution.

Tell the states about yourselves and how you got into software development.

My name is Damian Karzon I'm 23 and live in Brisbane, Commonwealth of australia. For me software evolution is pretty much in my blood, my parents did it and from them I was exposed to computers from a very young age. Started working with HTML as a teenager and then moved into VB and got fastened to the Microsoft stack through Uni and I've been doing it always since.

What do you call back of Microsoft's platform (from a user perspective) and how do you compare it to competitors?

I love Windows Phone. It'due south so different all the same and so unproblematic. The Live tiles and social integration really sets it apart from the rest.

What's the number i feature you lot love the most most Windows Telephone, and in Mango specifically?

Tiles! Windows Phone do these so well, peculiarly with the updates in mango. Yous can now pin certain functions of apps or the apps themselves, the tiles can be updated automatically in the background. Y'all can move them around your domicile screen and have every bit many as you want.

What path(due south) led you to develop for Windows Telephone?

I have been very interested in mobile devices for a long time, started with some Windows Mobile. Couldn't go into iPhone too much as I didn't want to fork out for a mac. The Windows Phone 7 was announced, using C# with Visual Studio and Blend, by far the best developer experience for a mobile platform.

What's your take on the Windows Phone evolution process?

I actually like what Microsoft accept done for developers specially with the mango release, it's clear they actually listened to what nosotros were all maxim and tried to help. A adept example of this is the developer preview for mango, this allowed registered developers to flash a version of mango onto their phones a few months earlier the real release came out.

Have you developed for any competing mobile platform and if so how does their development process compare?

I have tried a bit of Android as Java is a lot similar C# (at least syntax wise) but without the .Cyberspace framework and Visual Studio it was a lot harder than I thought.

I am a .NET developer, that's what I exercise every 24-hour interval and I know it well. At the moment I just do mobile apps for fun and developing for iPhone or Android just isn't fun for me so I'll stick to Windows Phone.

BoxShot for Dropbox is extremely popular, tell us about its development and how the idea came around.

Well I have always been a big fan of Dropbox and before Windows Phone 7 I had a Windows Mobile app called DroppedBoxx, this app was a bit of a hit as it was the showtime to implement whatsoever sort of binder syncing. From that spawned my open source Dropbox library, DropNet, which brought about support for Windows Telephone 7 then it was but logical that I made an app for information technology. I have recently released BoxShot v2 with some really dainty features for mango as well as a brand new (less obscene) logo.

What other Windows Phone projects are you working on (excluding previous apps)?

Don't actually have any new Windows Phone projects on the go at the moment, a few updates to existing apps (BoxShot and NumberTap mainly). Working on a few web projects here and there and touching a bit on Windows 8.

What advice would yous give to other aspiring developers?

Keep at it, just because your first app didn't make millions doesn't mean you should give up. For me Windows Phone development is just a chip of fun on the side, hopefully the fun stays in it.

Thank you for your fourth dimension. Any closing words near WP7's future?

Thanks, I'1000 pretty excited to see what'due south on the road ahead for Windows Phone. Whatsoever it is I'll exist there developing crawly new apps!

Check out Karzon's website, and be sure to follow him on Twitter.

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