This post has been long coming… should be started it back when I first heard of Nokia Music API prior to new of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia Devices division.
We all know Microsoft Windows Phone Dev team isn’t the fastest beast when it comes to pushing out new API. Many (myself included) welcomed Nokia’s SDKs with open arms as they can turn things around much faster.
We know that public 3rd Party Windows Phone API is fixed and involves querying for supported values – this makes supporting various bits of functionality across manufacturers easy. I am not referring to fragmentation of this.
When Nokia announced 1020, they pushed for a concept of reframing. They take two pics, high resolution and a low resolution. you as a user can only see low res on device. It doesn’t just end there, even the OS itself even through it can handle high res images is only aware of low res images. Wait!! What are am I going on about ? The OS doesn’t know about high res images even through they physically reside on the same physical directory.
If you ever wondered about how the images are stored.. let me give you a clue. according to Windows Phone, the camera roll points to “C:\Data\Users\Public\Pictures\Camera Roll” something the shared Windows NT kernel gave WP8 🙂
If you try to programmatically access this location, you are greeted with System.UnauthorizedAccessException.
With Lumia Black update, Nokia is bringing DNG support to devices. Whilst this is good news on the surface, it uses the same hack as the one used for high res – the device is unaware of it.
This leads to multitudes of device tiers hardware and software capabilities which are carefully controlled outside of public API and outside of Microsoft WPDev team itself.
At some point last year, I did ask Stephen Elop if APIs will merge once Devices division merges.. sadly all he replied was that he couldn’t comment on future.
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