Windows Phone 8 - App

[djSupport]

I'm a long time devoted fan of Windows Phones (from 2002) and I was thinking,
How cool would it be to create an app for Windows Phone 8 users like myself to get data from the realtime.txt file on your website and update the app with info or even update a live tile with for example the current temperature and wind speed/rain? I'm not a coder but i do pick things up fast so I may try and create one, would any of you find it useful?

[mcrossley]

If you develop one, I understand it will also have to be Windows 8 compatible in order to get into the Store. I have had a brief look and the entry criteria look pretty stringent to me, with multi-platform and screen resolution support

[djSupport]

I'm referring to Windows 'Phone' not Windows 8/RT surely all its got to do 'the app' is parse the text file and extract the data, which is what the BBC NEWS Mobile app does it just reads the bbc website then extracts the news from it...

[mcrossley]

Maybe you're right, I'm confusing tablet and mobile, I only got my developer licence code for Windows 8 the other day and I haven't really looked into it too deeply yet.

[djSupport]

Utilising the live tiles to display data from your weather station on your mobile phone looks like an amazing prospect, i may download the developer tools and look into it yet i have virtually non existent coding skills but in sure a tutorial will guide me on the basics!

[djSupport]

I've looked into it and its way above my head mainly because I cannot find any tutorials for parsing text files I wish the realtime.txt was an xml then it may be easier for me as there are xml tutorials, If anyone was willing to make this app I'd certainly pay for it in the marketplace!

and you can make it cross compatible with windows 8 I belive!

[mcrossley]

Maybe, sometime. I have a hello world Win 8 app and json parser working. The hard part is cool looking graphics layouts that scale, auto-layout for portrait/landscape, and tile nicely.

[steve]

I cannot find any tutorials for parsing text files I wish the realtime.txt was an xml then it may be easier for me as there are xml tutorials

You can create a data file in any format, including XML, using web tags. But I'd be surprised if the programming language didn't have an easy way to split a line of text based on a delimiter.

[djSupport]

That's the problem steve I'm like not a coder in anyway but looking at tutorials I can usually pick stuff up I cant work out where I'd start... I wouldn't worry about graphics mcrossley I'd keep to the windows style of basic Icons after all I'd just love the facts at a glance for example for me just the temp, rainfall and windspeed and as a live tile probably just the temp.