I’ve spent the last couple of days playing around with some Windows Phone 7 development. I decided to create a simple Google reader client as a practice app that later on down the track might at least be useful to me. Considering I have no background in Silverlight (mainly just web applications) I think I’ve managed to come quite a long way in a short amount of time.
The app current pulls in the given users unread counts and labels on the home screen with the labels located a swoosh to the right. From there you can jump straight to view a story or drill down into one of your labels.
Before I go too much further I would like to try get some feedback/ideas on what people want from a Google reader client (if anything).
The design is obviously a little dodgy at the moment my main plan here is to try utilized the wp7 concept of horizontal space. I am waiting for the official panorama/pivot controls and will look to implement those.
Features wise at the moment all the client does is query the Google reader api for feeds an stories. I am going to implement the core reader functionality – read and unread, starring and notes as well as some type of social sharing. I’d like to know how important offline reading / caching is to people so I can decide how much effort I need to put into that side of the application.
If you have any ideas let me know in the comments or on twitter – @lukencode.
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Did you ever get anywhere with this idea? I haven’t actually looked for a GReader app, nor do I use GReader -> however, I’m looking for a new solution to my RSS feeds, whereby all feeds are correctly marked over many devices. I currently use Opera and had hoped that they would sync the feeds using their Opera Sync feature. But the Opera devs haven’t done that yet so on the lookout for a new solution, one that includes WP7 hopefully.
@Tim yeah never ended up completing the app mainly because I noticed there were a heap of wp7 Google Reader apps already in development. Havent tried to many of them but I am sure there are a few that are decent enough.