Windows Phone 7 Launch Thread

evolutionqy7

which phone is that?

chrislad

Hmmm, I'm getting a lot of crashes. I've had to restart the phone 4 times today to get applications to start working. It's not like I have a lot on there, only about 8 apps.

Bulktohulk

Loving it so far, easily the best mobile OS out there at the moment in my opinion.

AntiVirus

I was looking at the new Faceboook app on the Windows Phone 7 and realised almost all the apps I've seen look better on the Windows Phone 7 than on Android or iPhone so what app's look better on either of the other 2 OS's than on windows phone 7?

evolutionqy7

for those in doubt check it out

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/25/adobe-confirms-flash-player-10-1-is-coming-to-blackberry-window/

beanian

any one found any irish developers?

I'm currently waiting for approval from microsoft to publish apps.
I have been developing mobile apps for years (commercial sector) and I am very excited by wp7.

I have an app in development (sabnzbd viewer + newzbin search tool) but once that one is done i'm looking for ideas for another app.
Maybe irish rail/ bus eireann timetables?

Any ideas?

Down South

beanian wrote: »

I'm currently waiting for approval from microsoft to publish apps.
I have been developing mobile apps for years (commercial sector) and I am very excited by wp7.

I have an app in development (sabnzbd viewer + newzbin search tool) but once that one is done i'm looking for ideas for another app.
Maybe irish rail/ bus eireann timetables?

Any ideas?

Timetables are a good idea. I'd like to see some Irish media eg radio, newspapers, news but I presume they are complicated by copyright. TV schedule also useful

muckwarrior

I'm currently developing a pumps.ie app, which should be finished by the end of the week.

beanian

muckwarrior wrote: »

I'm currently developing a pumps.ie app, which should be finished by the end of the week.

Sounds great! I'll be downloading that one.

How long did it take for your app hub approval once you submitted your ID & letter?

muckwarrior

Not that long, a couple of days as far as I remember.

AntiVirus

muckwarrior wrote: »

I'm currently developing a pumps.ie app, which should be finished by the end of the week.

Another good feature to add to this would be to show the nearest pumps to your current location and if they are open 24 hours or not.

I almost ran out of petrol coming back from Wexford! All the petrol stations my sat nav brought me to where closed!!!! :pac:

muckwarrior

Yep, it'll show stations in your proximity. Data for opening and closing times isn't available though.

AntiVirus

muckwarrior wrote: »

Yep, it'll show stations in your proximity. Data for opening and closing times isn't available though.

Just checked the online version and it does list the opening/closing times so maybe at a later date you could add this to the app versions

muckwarrior

AntiVirus wrote: »

Just checked the online version and it does list the opening/closing times so maybe at a later date you could add this to the app versions

Hmm, it's not available through their API, but I'll ask them if it's possible to add.

Dyr

Anyone having joy using phone 7 on silverlight sites?

wheresmybeaver

beanian wrote: »

I'm currently waiting for approval from microsoft to publish apps.
I have been developing mobile apps for years (commercial sector) and I am very excited by wp7.

I have an app in development (sabnzbd viewer + newzbin search tool) but once that one is done i'm looking for ideas for another app.
Maybe irish rail/ bus eireann timetables?

Any ideas?

muckwarrior wrote: »

I'm currently developing a pumps.ie app, which should be finished by the end of the week.

Sounds good.

Anybody want to have a stab at a webtext app? I built my own desktop webtext app in C# a few years ago that worked well for my own purposes, how tricky is it to port over to WP7, and are there costs associated with getting your app on the marketplace? As far as I can see, the developer tools are a free download (which is a good move).

By the way, I've had a solid 5 days of use of the HD7 and I'm fairly pleased. It kind of reminds me of the days when I bought "dumb" feature phones (eg Sony Ericsson W880) - everything looks great, is very fast, and integrates really well. As a messaging phone alone, WP7 wins. But of course there's the advantage of WP7 being a smartphone platform, so apps and upgrades are supported.

I can see there's plenty of hate out there for the half open / half closed approach Microsoft have taken here, but in the end I know what it'll mean; stability. Two years down the road, Android will be left with a mess of application conflicts, instability and decimated battery life, much like what used to happen with WM 6.5 once you were finished tinkering, changing themes, replacing system files etc etc. WP7 keeps most apps sandboxed so that they're not running services etc in the background, so even with 100 apps installed there should be no slowdowns, memory hogging or app conflicts.

Having said that, I did have to restart my HD7 twice over the weekend when it failed to load the Marketplace app. You're bound to find stuff like this in a 1.0 release...

John_Mc

wheresmybeaver wrote: »

Sounds good.

Anybody want to have a stab at a webtext app? I built my own desktop webtext app in C# a few years ago that worked well for my own purposes, how tricky is it to port over to WP7, and are there costs associated with getting your app on the marketplace? As far as I can see, the developer tools are a free download (which is a good move).

€99 a year to join the M$ AppCode market place so it's the same as Apple.

I'd be interested in doing a web text app. Did your app work by hacking the HTML Posts each network uses for their webtext?

wheresmybeaver

John_Mc wrote: »

€99 a year to join the M$ AppCode market place so it's the same as Apple.

I'd be interested in doing a web text app. Did your app work by hacking the HTML Posts each network uses for their webtext?

Actually now that I think about it, it was using a web service someone was hosting at the time. I don't think it's live anymore.

I'm ridiculously rusty at coding so I might have to have a go off the developer tools and emulator first to see if I can cobble together anything to justify the 99 euro.

And I think the webtext method you're proposing is the same as the tools available here

Great to have a few Irish devs looking at WP7! Keep it up

John_Mc

Yeah I'm delighted WP7 has arrived. I'm a .net developer so it's great to be able to jump straight in without any learning curve.

Quick

http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=208491&page=1&zoomIdx=1

I'll pass

John_Mc

Compare it to iOS1 or Android when they were first introduced and you'd see a pretty level playing field. Google improved Andorid by quite a lot in a very short timeframe.

We'll see how serious M$ are about WP7 in 2011 I think.

I can't believe Copy and Paste isn't in there from the start though. How can they not have Silverlight support in there as well?

wheresmybeaver

Quick wrote: »

http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=208491&page=1&zoomIdx=1

I'll pass

Yowzers.

Microsoft are late to the game alright and have a good bit of catching up to do, but I think they have a strong foundation to build on. Sure they threw buckets of money at XBOX and made a success of that!

It'd also be interesting to compare the featureset of the first release of each OS.

chrislad

I'm taking mine back tomorrow. I can't copy any music from my Mac so it's useless to me. Had a few too many crashes for my liking, but from searching, this seems to be more of an HD7 error than a Windows 7 one in general. I may get another one in time, but for now, I do think the OS has a lot of promise, and I look forward to it in an update or two.

evolutionqy7

chrislad wrote: »

I'm taking mine back tomorrow. I can't copy any music from my Mac so it's useless to me. Had a few too many crashes for my liking, but from searching, this seems to be more of an HD7 error than a Windows 7 one in general. I may get another one in time, but for now, I do think the OS has a lot of promise, and I look forward to it in an update or two.

ms only released sync tools for Mac with WP7 yesterday

chrislad

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

ms only released sync tools for Mac with WP7 yesterday

Link? It's not on the Zune page and I've seen no news stories that it was released.

evolutionqy7

took alot of scrolling in twitter to find this its not the zune client but its a sync client (beta) so guess it was kinda put together quickly to serve those who use Mac's. Very bad from MS side.

http://wmpoweruser.com/mac-client-for-windows-phone-7-now-available/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WmPowerUser+%28WM+Power+User%29&utm_content=Twitter

chrislad

Even the effort to actually find it is too much! I think I'll just leave it until they've gotten off their backsides. I listen to about 4 hours of books a day as I'm driving a lot. I'd be lost without them, and I can download through Audible directly without iTunes if needs be.

evolutionqy7

actually went and got zune software just for the crack

and have to say its very nice. its nicely integrated into everything including the marketplace

PS took a few minutes to get used and find whats where but once you do its actually very easy and loving the UI

beanian

First irish app i've found on the market

DART:
Timetables for all dart stations. Live updates etc

Looks handy for regular dart users.
€1.29( no trial)

thebman

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

which phone is that?

Oh I meant disappointing seeing the negative comments here along with being at the developer conference before the release left me with a negative impression.

I don't have a Phone 7, I've held off changing from 6.5 to see if this release would amount to much.