Physiotherapy Exercises for Windows Phone published

Well I finally managed to get my first windows phone application published.  This allows you to search almost 1000 exercises suitable for people with various forms of spinal cord injury and other neurological conditions.

It is completely free to download.

Features include

• search by condition, exercise type, body part, equipment available and age
• images are customised by condition, age and orientation
• ability to save exercises into booklets
• simple videos demonstrating key concepts
• listen to exercises on the go
• emailing booklets to others
• find other physiotherapists, hospitals and more via integration with bing maps

The challenge was to write the majority of it so I could share code with the desktop silverlight version as well as the old web version.

The desktop version uses the silverlight pivot viewer control.

Key bits that I found useful

• Long List Selector from the silverlight windows phone toolkit. The gallery and list views of the exercises displays up to 1000 images in a list, and this handles it very well. Using a normal listcontrol was not practical when running on a real phone.
• The Autocompletebox from the toolkit had issues with positioning when it was inside a listcontrol. So I had to put in hacks to get this to work. Jeff Wilcox commented on this recently.
• The program allows the playback of exercises, so you can listen to them as well. This uses the microsoft translate api, much of the ideas coming from the loud tweets demo.
• The mapping and geolocational options were handled by using bing maps api.
• The twitter links were handled by using the twitter api.
• I found the best way to take screenshots for the marketplace is using the snipping tool.
• I wanted the users to be able to report errors to me automatically, I found this post helpful. I also wanted to use a custom message box.
• To give better information on usage, I can recommend the silverlight analytics api.

Hopefully over the coming weeks, I can blog about some of the other things I learnt from this. Feel free to post and suggest topics.