Back in 2013, for the first time I have seen the heavy air pollution caused by forest burning and start to hear "Haze" often from the news broadcasting companies and over social media. I have never knew the dangers and side effects of the haze on human lives and especially on our health. While I was away from the affected area and I was spending my days and nights far from the people who suffer from the polluted air, I have decided to start developing a simple application on Microsoft Windows Phone platform to display the latest updates, so the people can adjust their daily activities and take necessary precautions.

In the beginning getting the data was not simple and I always had my worries about getting reliable data for my app. But in the same days, I get an opportunity to know a group of motivated people at Evozi who have been working and dedicating their time to build an API to deliver seamless data and they agreed to give me an exclusive permission to use their back-end service with my new upcoming application. In the beginning the structure of the application was as simple as it only display the air pollution and weather details of a single location and allow the users to choose a different location from the list.

Last week I attended to Windows Phone 7 Development workshop at Taylor’s University which was from Nokia Developers and Microsoft Malaysia. The event starts with an introduction about Windows Phone 7 platform and its amazing features. The first feature and the most unique one among the other phone platforms is the Live Tiles which shows the applications and the number of the pending notifications of each app. It also updates base on any changes in the application and its content. For example, you can create an application for the weather to display the current weather, as the weather changes the live tile will changes and displays the current weather condition in form of graphic and text.

Comparing to other phone platforms, Windows Phone 7 use the simple and flat images as the Tiles (Icons) but you still can choose an image as your application’s tile. The simplicity of the live tile will prevent any confusion for user to understand the app content. One of the criteria of developing and publishing an app to Windows Phone Marketplace is to choose the best image (should be related to app) as the tile.

In Windows Phone 7, the user experience improved a lot even when you compare it with other existing phone operating systems, you will find out it’s very easy to use Windows Phone. As managing and arranging the contents on the phone size screen is very difficult and important, in Windows Phone there are different layout controls which are flexible and simple to use for developers. If the existing controls are not enough, you still can add more by downloading the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.