Windows Phone 7 – Tube Companion (Pre RTM)

Ive recently completed my Tube Companion application for Windows Phone 7.  The application was built with a pre-RTM version of the toolkit, but once the RTM version has been released then i’ll retest the code base, and barring any major breaking changes I should be good to go.

The application itself is basically a tool to assist users who utilise the London Underground.  A complete list of functionality in this first release is as follows:

Line Status - Live updates of the status of each of the tube lines.

Tube Map - A version of the tube map with pinch/zoom enabled.

Station lookup – Lookup every station on the London Underground network.

Live Departure Boards – Display the live departure boards for certain tube station/tube line pairings.

Stations Near Me – Shows the ten nearest stations to the user within a 10 mile radius,

Tube This Weekend – Displays the planned disruptions to the tube lines/stations for the forthcoming weekend.

Push Notifications – Push notifications can be enabled to alert users of problems with each of the tube lines.

Demo of the app here:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Phone 7 - Jogging Application Part 2

Image
In an earlier blog , I produced a very basic application for Windows Phone 7 that allowed joggers to track their progress of a training session on a Bing Map. The application simply plotted a map polyline whenever there was a change in the device’s location, with the changes in the devices location being raised as events by the GeoCoordinateWatcher class, which is part of the Windows Phone 7 API. Now although the user’s training session was plotted on the map, with the start and end points being identified with pushpins on the map, the application didn’t indicate to the user the total distance travelled, so to obtain this I decided to use the Route Service, which is one of the Bing Maps Web Services. Route Service As the name suggests, the route service is an API used to calculate routes between designated start and end points. In order to use the Route service, a service reference to http://dev.virtualearth.net/webservices/v1/routeservice/routeservice.svc?wsdl needs to b...
Read more

Windows Phone 7 - Selecting device photos without PhotoChooserTask

Image
A common feature of mobile based applications is the ability to let you view photos that have been taken with the device. For Silverlight based Windows Phone 7 applications, this functionality would generally be achieved by utilising the PhotoChooserTask. The PhotoChooser task navigates to the phones photo gallery section, allows the user to select a photo and then returns this photo to the calling application. Now this approach is fine for the majority of circumstances, but what happens if more flexibility is required by the application for image selection? In this case the MediaLibrary class can be utilised to retrieve images from the device, and then displayed in whichever way the application chooses. The following shows simple examples of both approaches. PhotoChooserTask Implementation Here we have a very simple UI that contains a button to select a photo and a currently unassigned image control. The following code is then used to display the images on the phone. priva...
Read more

Windows Phone 7 - London Tube Companion Application

Image
As part of my continual learning of Windows Phone 7, I decided to develop an application which displays the status of tube lines for the London Underground. As well as displaying the line status, the application also allows users to request push notifications when the status of a tube line changes. Windows Phone 7 architecture allows for several types of push notifications, all of which are delivered by the cloud based Push Notification service. The notification types are as follows: Raw Notification : Raw Data is sent to the application. Only available when the application is open. Tile Notification: If the application is pinned to the phone’s start screen, then the application’s tile can be modified. Toast Application: Text based notification is displayed to the currently active screen. This does not require the application to be open. In this example I decided to use toast notifications to inform the u ser of any changes to the tube line status, as it would allow the user to b...
Read more