CoasterBuzz launches app for Windows Phone 7

But it's still iTunes.

Oh yeah? Well, you're Diguesting!

Disneyfreak.

You are both not my friend! ;-)

Oh yeah? Well! Um. Your favorite coaster sucks!

Clint, you're not coaster enough. Not to mention, you're an armchair comedian.

The whole check-in thing is an odd phenomenon for me. Particularly once I moved out here, I was shocked to find other people checking in at a small restaurant. People in Seattle are really connected.

That said, it would bring a totally new life to the meeting calendar, given the real-time nature. The connectedness of data here has surprised even me. Some parks have an overload of information, and it's hard to know where to even start. Look at the Cedar Point page, for example. So many trip reports.

Right now the app doesn't do any kind of member-specific stuff because I didn't do anything to expose that. I'd like to see if there's any pick up on it first. Android and iPhone apps aren't out of the question, but in a lot of ways I view these things more as an attraction to people who don't already know about us than to existing members.

Right now I'm focusing on the v9 of the forums, and I finally feel like there's progress.

Yep I could see the issues with member privacy - but that is what legal"ease" is for I suppose. God knows Itunes dumps enough of it on me whenever they change something...

Looking forward to the future with it.

CreditWh0re said:

Jerry said:
One thing I'd love to see is a GPS locator within the app for finding fellow coasterbuzz members at parks etc...

It's called nerdR.

(thumbs up) delan likes this.

Jeff said:
In the long run, what I really want to do is make the entire site mobile browser friendly, but that won't come until after v9 of the forum is mature, and even then there are a host of other things I'd like to do first.

When I'm out of town I browse the site almost entirely on my Droid (1) and have very few issues.

Yeah, it generally looks fine on iPhone and WP7 as well (although this version launched a year after iPhone, so shame on me if I didn't get that right). And as much as I try to keep the markup efficient, it could be slimmer and faster with something intended for mobile. The new platform really lends itself well to that (ASP.NET MVC, for the nerds out there), because I can basically throw a different "skin" on it without changing any logic.

I still have to see more good reviews on WP7, especially from non-Microsoft people (the two I have seen so far are from Jeff and from a Microsoft evangelist in Minnesota). I owned a handheld with the old Windows CE operating system and wrote trucking software on another Windows Mobile platform. Both were horrible experiences and have soured me completely on the whole Microsoft and phone combination.

I am under contract with my iPhone 4 for another year and a half so that will give me enough time to see if WP7 is the real deal or not. I'm hoping it is, actually. A lot of my company's customers have been looking for web AND mobile solutions and being able to do the entire thing under the Microsoft stack and have it work well would be awesome.

Jeff said:
Yeah, it generally looks fine on iPhone and WP7 as well (although this version launched a year after iPhone, so shame on me if I didn't get that right). And as much as I try to keep the markup efficient, it could be slimmer and faster with something intended for mobile. The new platform really lends itself well to that (ASP.NET MVC, for the nerds out there), because I can basically throw a different "skin" on it without changing any logic.

Was wondering when the site would go to ASP.NET MVC. I honestly think the whole MVC project has been one of the best things to come out of Redmond in years.

Maybe the app has nothing to do with strength of sales (Palm Pre sold well initially), reviews, or ease of programming over the fact Microsoft has been encouraging it's employees to create WM7 applications, to the point of giving them new phones. To which I'd say good for Jeff, I wish I was employed at a place that encouraged and supported such endeavors.

Yeah, we didn't have to pay the app store fee either, which is why I cranked two apps out already.

I know I sound like a broken record, but just because one product was suboptimal doesn't make everything else. The company is enormous, and more often than not, one product has nothing to do with the next. Forget the reviews... go to a store and play with one.

If you've developed with Silverlight, you mostly know phone dev.

Yeah, Microsoft got it right with the gaming console platform.