Coding Staff: "WP7 is a serious competitor to iOS"

Coding Staff wins the Special App of the Day competition and talks about developing for WP7 vs. iOS

Apps are fun.  In a recent impromptu company poll that involved the use of pizza bagels as bribes for participation, we here at Vator were stunned to realize that we all have apps on our phones.  And we like them!

That was a lie.  There was no company poll.  Nor were there any pizza bagels.  But I'm sure that if I mustered up the initiative to ask my coworkers what kinds of apps they have on their phone, I would discover a whole bunch of new apps I'd never heard of.  (Side note: I know that Ronny Kerr has an image of Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey" as his iPhone wallpaper.  He says it's so that he "never forgets.")

We like apps, so we recently decided to take a closer look at the WP7 app ecosystem, and to that end, we partnered with Microsoft to launch the “Special App of the Day” competition so that we could get to know the companies who are developing for WP7.  This month’s winner is Coding Staff, which created the Reminder App for Windows Phone 7.

The Reminder App syncs with your Facebook account so you can keep track of your friends’ birthdays, see birthdays you’ve missed, see upcoming birthdays, and send out happy birthday messages to friends’ Facebook pages.  New versions of the app will include integration with your contacts list, the ability to save birthday message templates, as well as integration with other social networks, like LinkedIn.

Founded in 2009 as a Web design agency by CEO Mikita Mikado, Coding Staff now has offices in Nevada, Hawaii, the UK, and Belarus, and employs 30 artists, technicians, programmers, marketing experts, and project managers.  Its beginnings were much humbler, though.  The company got its start as a team of four people working out of a studio designing DotNetNuke modules and websites.  Today, in addition to mobile apps and DotNetNuke modules, Coding Staff creates DNN skins, SharePoint web parts, Sharepoint themes, and CS-Cart templates.

Interestingly, however, while Coding Staff develops apps for iOS and WP7, it doesn’t offer apps for Android.  “The reason we don't develop for the Android is quite silly,” Mikado tells me.  “We don't have a full time developer dedicated for it.  And we didn't actually look for one.  iOS apps were essential to have for our startup, Quote Roller, that is why we hired folks from that field.  WP7 was just a thing to try for our .net developers.  We were intrigued by its release and first use experience.”

As for how developing for the two operating systems differs, Mikado explains: “I'd say that the process and technologies are totally different.  When we started to work with WP7, it was a quite raw platform. With the release of 'Mango, the platform actually got to the point where it could be considered a serious competitor to iOS.  I actually really like WP7 and its interface.  Part of the reason we started to develop for it was the new concept of ‘Metro’ UI, which we really liked.”