Windows Phone 7 Apps

Here’s a grand piano app. The dev notes that it’s written in Silverlight but uses XNA Audio extensions for a smaller app. Just take a look:

SilverTranslate is a simple Bing powered translation app. Enter text in one language on top and it converts it to the language of your choice at bottom by using Bing’s translate feature (so it’s all over the air). Here it is in action:

It’s a WP7 port of MyTrainLog which lets you enter complex workout plans, with sets and supersets and with no restrictions. Here’s a glimpse of it in action which is noted as a ‘very rough first impression’:

Some people were concerned that WP7 wouldn’t have a lot of multiplayer real time games. The reasons is because MS did not provide some developer tools for this. MS provided turn by turn games (like chess) but not real time multiplayer games where both players play simultaneously. Anyway, here’s a clip of a multiplayer online chess game.

The developer also has additional functions here. You can watch others playing online, attend a chess lecture, practice endgames and configure your account.

Today; another one of Andy Beaulieu's projects, Boss Launch 2: Zombie Attack.

This is the much-awaited sequel to Boss Launch, titled "Boss Launch 2: Zombie Attack" - in which you use your (normally useless) boss to take out a Zombie horde as you progress through many challenging levels. Things get interesting when you interact with vehicles (such as jumping into the back of a truck).

A game written by Andy Beaulieu, dropping a jester downwards letting him grab balloons for score and to avoid danger.


The nice thing about this game is that since it's developed in Silverlight Andy decided to release version you can test on the web, check it out here.

The game Frozen Bubble is being ported to XNA to get it over to Windows Phone 7.

The developer writes:

I am currently porting Frozen Bubble from perl to C# XNA. My goal is to have the game up and running under Windows Phone 7.
Currently everything works except menu’s and multiplayer. This is planned for one of the coming weeks. Stay tuned for updates!

Here is a Windows phone 7 application for tracking buses and the routes they follow in Chicago.

This app will make sure you never miss a bus, and perhaps more importantly, will make sure you know the best time to leave your house or office so you don’t end up standing and waiting at the bus stop for a ridiculous amount of time.

It takes full advantage of the Bing Maps Silverlight control to plot out exact GPS locations of buses and stops, making sure you always know the optimal time to leave.

BusTrack can even group your most frequent stops together by a “location” so you don’t have to bounce in and out of different routes that you might want take to your destination.

The app was written by Matt Hidinger, a .Net expert, who’s blog can be found in the attached link.

"Ahead" is a Windows Phone 7 application that lets you manage your projects on-the-go. Get tasks done according to priorities, time your work for any project, keep an eye on invoices you sent, make sure to remember your expenses... There are a lot of things you'll be able to do with your Windows Phone.

Ahead — Manage your projects on-the-go. from Ahead App on Vimeo.

Feelign old school? Missing the 80's? Have no fear, Arkanoid has been ported to WP7.

WeatherBug is the largest (their claim) private weather network in the world, and offers clients for many of the major mobile OS platforms, including Windows Mobile. They've now laid the groundwork for porting the WM client to WP7 and apparently its gone pretty smoothly. Unfortunately for those of us outside the US, WeatherBug doesn't offer the full range of functionality that's available inside the US, but the app is free for those of you who don't mind ads.

Another app is one for the London Tube which shows you their current status and pushes notifications to your phone if there are delays or problems. Similar programs exist on the iPhone for the NYC subway.

Paper Ball by Jimmy Interactive, which looks stylized enough to be something on an iPhone. Think of it as literally paper-football, where the paper are people cutouts. You direct your offense/defense by drawing their plot and then watch what happens. Looks to be a fun little time-waster and the graphics are just superb.

The new multiplayer game for windows mobile phones named Galaxies has been prepared by Ageye - a well known name in developing games. Like the Caver game, a side scrolling windows mobile using accelerometer, this windows phone app requires a device with an accelerometer. In WP7 game Galaxies your roll will be as an elite pilot who commands the elite combat ship in galaxies with full of enemies and you have to kill them.


Galaxies game Features :

• Control the game using the accelerometer
• Different alien classes up to 10
• 4 different level types
• Number of levels unlimited
• Real-time online multiplayer mode
• Online high score for the single player and multiplayer mode

More physics love comes to WP7 from Andy Beaulieu. Like last time you can try this guy out online right now since it’s Silverlight based. You get to see physics, changes in perspective and gestures and he’s provided the source code. Check it out on his website. In an interesting note he talks about how this was created:

This Shuffleboard game was created as the basis for a Coding4Fun tutorial, which will be available soon on the C4F Website. I don’t want to spoil the fun for the official tutorial release so I won’t go into much detail here, but this demo should be helpful for folks wanting to quickly create physics based games for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.

When the tutorial is released, it will include a video walkthrough showing step-by-step creation using Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4.

The app is a ‘dress up’ app where you can dress up characters in different clothing, etc. There’s certainly a market for that out there and this app seems to handle it well. The thing I’m more excited for is that their website features a series of XNA based games (including one for Zune) so their interest in WP7 hopefully means there are a few ports in the work…

Man the devs are really shining on WP7 already. Here’s an app from Nowsci that’s in final form (we just need phones:)). It’s a Goog RSS reader but it focuses on aesthetics and pre-caches data so there are no delays to pull data as you go through the app. Here’s the feature list:

• Full access to labels, feeds, and all starred or unread items
• Pre-buffering of articles as you read, just like the web version of Google Reader, to keep things moving without delay
• Marking items, feeds, or labels read and unread
• Starring your favorite items
• Instant synchronization with your Google Reader account

Let’s see it in action:

Pretty neat little app here. It’s a diary. Go to the date and you get some options. You start by creating an image (if you want) with drawing tools and some preset icons and emoticons to insert and the like. It all seems easy to use. And once your done move on down and you can type and entry to go along with it. Why not take a look at it in action.

MetroTwit for your PC is now available as a beta download. It’s a Twitter app that has the look and feel of Metro – the WP7 theme. Features:


* If you ever want to read more tweets, just scroll down and more will appear almost instantly. Be careful though, it’s addictive and you could be scrolling for hours.

* You don’t have to switch away from what you’re doing to keep tabs on new tweets. A counter in the taskbar will tell you exactly how many unread messages there are.

* The people and topics you care about, at your fingertips. Simply start typing any part of a username or hashtag and we’ll find them for you.

* Read excerpts from new tweet updates as they cycle through in the notifications. If you run out of time, hover over the notifications to stop the countdown to read even more.

* Not all columns must be created equal. You have the choice and flexibility to control exactly how your columns should look.

* The vector-based user interface powered by Windows Presentation Foundation works and looks even better in high DPI.


If you want to test it out the beta is available on their site: http://www.metrotwit.com/

One of the more interesting and useful apps in development for Windows Phone 7 is "My MediaCenter Remote" which integrates with the Windows Media Center (an under-rated features of Windows 7). Well, it's useful if you don't want to splurge $10 for a physical remote, ya cheapskate.

The latest version by dgaust is near beta, although like other developers he's anxiously awaiting a physical device to actually run it on. The features so far completed are as follows:

* View and play Recorded TV - done
* View and play back tv stored by myTV - done
* View music, and create album playlists - done
* Remote control media centre - done

What's left is tweaking up some of the graphics, which are a bit dull or just missing at this point (placeholders). Overall though, considering we are still six months from the release of WP7, it's nice to know we should have some advanced media center functionality right out the gate. But we can't help but wish this could actually stream our content instead of just being a remote for it.