My second #WP7 App – Saints Footy

Ok, so I’m on a roll!  Last week I got my first #WP7 App out.

This week , I grabbed the v2 of the Social Viewer Template for Windows Phone 7 from codeplex and put together another windows phone 7 app, which I called Saints Footy.

It has twitter feeds, feeds from news sites and fan sites, and the facebook feed from saints.com.au – the best way to experience Saints Footy on Windows Phone!!

Now, if only the Saints would win a few more games….

Big shout out to Nick Randolph and Dave Glover for a wonderful job with the Social Viewer Template. 

My #WP7 App – FrankArr Tracker

I’ve been meaning to write an Windows Phone app for ages. I even told Brandon Watson that I would.

I just never got around to it, until I saw a tweet from Nick Hodge which inspired me to get started

Nick pointed me to the Windows Phone 7 Social Viewer Application Template that Nick Randolph and Dave Glover had put together.

The Social Viewer template is a Visual Studio template that allows you to jump start the development of a Windows Phone 7 application. It provides the foundations of an application that can aggregate multiple RSS/Atom feeds, Facebook and Twitter.

I downloaded the zip file, looked over the documentation the guys had put together, and then I got started.

First, I got the tools installed onto my Samsung Series 9 laptop.

• Installed Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Install January 2011 Windows Phone Tools Update

Next, I fired up Visual Studio, opened up the Social Viewer App Template and got coding.

Then I got my kids involved to design the app icon.

Emma suggested I put “Tech Frank” onto a radar image – so off I went.

I futzed with Paint.Net for a while trying to get the image just right.  Dave was right – the icon is the thing that took the longest time!

Bill gave me a few pointers and voila – application icon created!

So what does the app do?

Well, you’re going to have to install it and find out for yourself

Enjoy!! Who knows, you may find FrankArr in your neck of the woods!

The word of the year is ”App”! ?

I saw  a news article recently that the word of the year for 2010 was “App”, as voted by the American Dialect Society

So true.

I picked up a Windows Phone 7 when it launched back in November. I’m a loyal (some say foolish) T-Mobile customer, so I went with the T-Mobile HTC HD7

I must admit I have been pretty happy with the phone (anyone surprised to hear that) apart from one thing.

It was reset by one of my kids when they tried to unlock the phone. He put in the wrong pin a few times, which got an policy enforced to do a remote wipe. I must admit, I did loose my cool for a while. I almost ruined christmas for my family a second time, but cooler heads prevailed.

The experience taught me a few things, which brings me back to apps. The one most relevant to this is that I need a way to remember what apps I have installed on the phone. Since I had installed most of my apps “Over The Air”, there is no way to “automagically” restore the installed apps. If I had installed them via the desktop client (aka Zune Client) they would have be reinstalled. Now, the good thing when I do ‘re-install’ the apps, is that the the marketplace tells me that I have already purchased them so I don’t have to buy them again.Phew!

So, how do I remember what apps I have installed? It seems there is no easy way. However, I found a great little site, developed by an italian MVP, called WP7Applist. It a pretty cool site that is full of reviews, updates, news of new apps etc, but the one thing i  L-O-V-E about it is the ability to tag an app you have installed and it creates the My WP7A library.

I took a look at the page, did some scrapping and voila – the apps I have installed on my phone!

Yeah, it’s a bunch of apps isn’t it and I haven’t gotten to games yet!!! I’ll save that for another post.