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Looks like they finally got their own Audible app so now it appears pretty complete. If that had happened sooner i'd probably be using my wp7 now instead of my shiny new droid.
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If you already have an idea of what you want to be able to do you can always search the marketplace to see if it's there. So far, there are over 100,000 apps but if the kind of thing you want to do is not there it doesn't matter whether there are 5 apps or a million. 
Kevin
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Spot on!
But sometimes you don't even know you need an app until your're told that it exists.
That was the case with Tasker[^] for me, and therefore my question.
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Rest assured.. all the necessary apps ( Skype , App launchers etc.) are either already there or on their way to hit the Marketplace.
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SalCon wrote: I chanced upon a Windows phone last night and came away pretty impressed.
I gather that most people who have one like it. I have one and I like it. However, it is also the first smartphone I've owned so I can't say how it compares to iPhone and Android - except that my Apple fan boy brother was also impressed with it (Nokia Lumia).
Kevin
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That way I can consider myself a little experienced  ... Have owned Galaxy S1 then the S3 and also tested iPhone 4. Sans the hype.. IMHO when it comes to functionality Android usually scores over iPhone but my brief encounter with the windows phone made me think about a possible switch in the future.
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I've had both iPhone and WP7.5. I like the windows phone better. The only thing that is really annoying is that the facebook integration doesn't filter out all the game statuses, etc. This is due to an integration issue since it is an external app and I beleive the claim is that they cannot do that with an external app.
The graphics are responsive, the live tiles are really nice, I like having them. The UI design with the keyboard (on the HTC Titan) is really nice, I like the keyboard staying on the bottom and the suggestion bar as well. I like that the browser address bar is on the bottom and always visible. This lets you interact with it without putting your hands in the viewing area. I think they should go further with the theme and let you colorize the main tiles to different colors instead of restricting you to one color.
There are a few minor things that can can be corrected, such as if they have a .com button on the keyboard and the last character you typed was a period, it would be left with ..com. This can be easily addressed.
Overall, I do like it better than the IPhone, especially having a device with a larger screen. I can type faster with the windows phone and make corrections easier as well. The suggestions bar works much better than the suggestions on the IPhone.
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Considering that WinPhone is a new platform there might be a few glitches initially , as was the case with the "pre-2.0 Android".
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I assume that WP 8 will be better still, though of course will require a new phone. In the meantime it will be interesting to see what if anything WP 7.8 adds apart from the start screen. Personally, I'm not that bothered as I'm happy enough for the time being.
Kevin
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I've had a Windows Phone 7, the HTC Trophy, since January. It's my second smartphone, the first being an Android.
I loved the droid for about 6 months, until the apps I downloaded and used started slowing it down. I used app killers to free memory, and they helped somewhat, but never solved the problem, and seemed to become less effectgive over time. It eventually got to where I was pulling the battery out every week to reset it just so that I didn't have to wait literally minutes for the phone to respond to every button press. I hate Apple, but if my choice was limited to iPhone or a droid, I would pay the premium for an iPhone before I every buy another droid. I'm happy to say that Microsoft gave me a better choice.
My WP7 is a 3G, single-core device, with lots of apps loaded and used, and yet its performance never suffers. It's very fast, always responsive. The navigation is intuitive, I can get to every function I need with a few finger motions, the Metro interface can be customized much more than the droid (although not as much as I'd like) and for some apps is more useful than a static icon, giving you information without having to start the app itself.
There's room for improvement, but it's vastly superior to the droid, hands down.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave.
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Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a programming language to admit undefined behaviors? Here I mean undefined behavior in the C/C++ sense where, for example, “anything can happen” when you use an uninitialized variable. In my opinion, five conditions need to be fulfilled. Five ways it works... if you know what you're doing.
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When the program is not meant to be put to actual use! 
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When I'm drunk.
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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This is University of Utah we are talking about here.
Sincerely Yours,
Brian Hart
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Yesterday a comment on HackerNews got me thinking about the horrible horrible code I used to produce as a young human (and to this day). Here is a non-exhaustive list of the worst monstrosities I have created in the past 13 years. Better to have coded and lamented than never to have coded at all.
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My story is probably similar to one thousand others: used to be a Java programmer, switched to Ruby. While discussing the “why” is probably not really relevant, I wanted to take the opportunity to write about the good and bad points of the transition, from my own personal point of view. I’m in both environments each and every week, which gives me a rather good view of my own quirks about each language. Polyglot programmer pet peeves.
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Kind of terrible languages to try and compare, Java assumes the programmer is stupid and takes away features present in other languages so they won't be misused (e.g. operator overloading, unsigned variables), and on the other hand Ruby is the most flexible language I know of (you even can redefine syntax to some extent as it runs...it's kind of scary actually).
But honestly with this article you could pretty much replace Java with any strongly typed compiled language (e.g. C#, C++) and Ruby with any dynamically typed scripting language (e.g. Python, Javascript) and the article still works mostly (the naming thing maybe not).
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I’m going to show you how to get started writing 6502 assembly language. The 6502 processor was massive in the seventies and eighties, powering famous computers like the BBC Micro, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Bender in Futurama has a 6502 processor for a brain. Even the Terminator was programmed in 6502. It’s a dead language isn’t it? Well, yeah, but so’s Latin. And they still teach that. Q.E.D.
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One question I get a lot is, “are your dotfiles published anywhere?” For some reason, people want to know how my computer is configured. What’s the secret sauce that keeps me productive? As programmers we are voyeur-tinkerers. We study our colleagues’ work environments and adjust our own in response. What works for them might work for us too. The next time you adjust a setting, think twice.
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The software production process has several major “inventory” accumulation points, itself. Stuff accumulates at those points and ends up wasting a lot of time and money. Let’s go over the three places most inventory accumulates. A place to keep your stuff while you go out and code more stuff.
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Microsoft's Tami Reller has announced that Windows 8 will Release to Manufacturing (RTM) in the first week on August, with a release in late October to retail stores. Speaking at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Canada, Reller revealed that the company is "on track" to finishing the final copy of Windows 8 in early August. Are you ready?
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For electronics, smaller is almost always better. Moore's Law—which says that the amount of transistors one can cram into a given amount of space tends to double about every eighteen months—still holds roughly true for NAND flash. There's a lot happening with solid state storage, and a lot more set to happen—but some serious problems need to be solved first. 640k was never enough for anyone.
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