As mentioned (http://www.odd-uk.com/wp7-storing-colours/) I’ve been updating Bin Day to support the new features in Mango, unfortunately due to a combination of the problems I talked about in the previous blog post and ‘real life’ commitments this took a little longer than I’d hoped.

But it’s now fully baked and available in the Windows Phone Marketplace, you can download by following the link below (there’s a FREE trial available!), if you have already purchased then the update should show on you Windows Phone Marketplace tile in the next few days.

Here are the details of the upgrades and additions that appear in V2.0.0

Live Tile

The number one request has been live tile functionality, well I’m glad to say that it’s arrived in V2.0!

Live Tile Front

You can see on the front the Bin Day recycle logo, this is used as a ‘countdown’ to the next collection. Each of the 6 segments of the logo represent a 24 hour period and will dim one by one as it approaches your next collection day. The major decision I made here is that if the collection is more than 6 days away you won’t really need to know. In the centre of the logo is the count of the number of bins that will be collected. At the top of the tile is a thin row of coloured strips, this represents the colours of the bins in the next collection.

One thing that I don’t like in the new live tile API is you can only schedule live tile updates for up to 14 days if the application isn’t run This causes a bit of a UX problem for me, with the live tile functionality incorporated I imagine that for most users for most of the time, Bin Day will be a  ‘set and forget’ app, you will enter your data, pin the tile to the home screen and all the information you need is right there on display. However, at the moment you will need to run the application at least once every 14 days. Like it or not I’m bound to the way the phone works and I need to alert the user that they need to run the app, so when the tile is about to stop being updated (currently set at 2 days away) a small alert symbol shows in the top right corner.

Live Tile Back

On the back you can see the next collection date and small icons of the bins that are due to collected. The tile will show the first five bins that are due for collection on the next collection date, any more and the tile will prompt you to run the app. This is a trade off between keeping the information legible and displaying instant information.

Updated Graphics

I’m trying to bring the app more into line with the Metro style so I’ve revamped the icons and general look of the app.

Additional Languages

Version one was localized to the US, UK and Germany, in version two I’ve added four more languages, Danish, French, Italian and Spanish hopefully making the app useful to a much broader audience. I had help from some good friends for a lot of the translation work but some still went through a combination of Bing Translate an Google Translate, so if you spot any howlers please let me know in the comments below and I can get them fixed up.

Email & SMS

Added the ability to either email or txt the next collection details to somebody.

Cleaned up About Panel

The about panel on version 1.0 was a bit messy, I’ve cleaned it up and split out the about, feedback and help into separate screens.

Splash Screen

Tidied up the splash screen and hopefully ended up with something a little more classy

Full Change Log.

Bin Day Version 1.0.0

• Initial Launch

Bin Day Version 2.0.0

• Added: Live Tile and Scheduled Agent
• Added: Email collection details
• Added: SMS collection details
• Fixed: Brown looked red
• Improved: General graphics update