Windows Phone 7 Google Reader App (GREAD) Work In Progress

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.

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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.