Mobile TFL – London Tube Updates On Your Windows Mobile Phone
A very quick late night post.
I’m a big fan of HTC’s Touch Diamond once you remove all the cruft that the major phone networks like to cram onto their devices. It’s a pocket sized, powerful smart phone. I picked one up only a few months ago as a replacement for my HTC Touch, which was starting to feel very very slow compared to some of the handsets on the market, and the addition of HDSPA on the Diamond was the clincher.
Anyway, as a result the good lady has been quite impressed with the functionality of the Diamond. She works in the media and the ability to access the internet with an almost desktop like experience (and without an iPhone) was very appealing. While we were in town this weekend sorting out a new contract for her, I noticed that Google’s G1 ships with a London Tube service status application. Seeing as Eleanor lives in London it seemed like an instantly cool thing to have on hand, but to my surprise, there isn’t anything comparable available for Windows Mobile (or there is and it’s too difficult to track down).
So I wrote one.
I’ve put up a really REALLY retro holding page at http://www.davidwhitney.co.uk/software for the purpose of releasing this application, hopefully over the coming months I’ll use it as a gather place for all the applications I’ve written, both free and pay-for, but for the moment, feel free to go and pick up a copy of the ingeniously named MobileTFL (after the transport-for-London website, where the application sources its data).
If you’re too lazy to click through one link:
Download Mobile TFL for Windows Mobile Here (Cab file)
You’ll have to forgive the exceptionally low-fi website and hilarious low res Visual Studio 2008 virtual machine screenshot. I’ve only really tested the app on the Diamond I have sitting on my desk right now and it works a treat.
Obviously it requires you have a data plan that’s from a company that believes in Mobile internet rather than customer robbery but it only uses a tiny amount of data (it’s just a Http request).
It also requires the Compact Framework. I’ve built it under CF3.5 but I suspect it’ll run just fine under CF2.0 (they’re binary compatible after all).
Feedback is more than welcome, just send me an email about it. I’m especially interested on how the rendering looks on your devices, as the rendering code was written quite quickly and as soon as it looked ok in the VM and on my device I pretty much packaged it up.
I doubt it’ll brick your device, but if it does, you know the drill, it’s your problem.
Time for sleep now.
[Update: Microupdate to version 1.0.0.3 to fix a few bugs and aestetics, the above link has changed, revisit it for the new version]