[Windows Phone 7 Software Development] Jim Chapman:
Glad you like it - and thankyou for your thoughts; the app is definitely work in progress, and I am keen to hear any ideas for further developments (though do bear in mind that, if you want recognition or even payment for any suggestions, we need to discuss Intellectual Property matters up-front).

To the particular points you mention:

Yes, I see the problem. My basic issue is that WP7 Silverlight text-rendering is horribly slow, so I am having to take nasty short cuts, which do mess up the text layout somewhat. I will be looking at this some more, once I actually have a phone to work with (so far, all development has been done on the emulator, and I need to see what text size & spacing values work right on real screens). I suspect I have a bug somewhere, that's getting the width of ' ' wrong [edit: I've found the bug, and it will be fixed in a new release in the coming days]

Yes I have been wondering about that. I need to be able to do 3 things to a book on the bookshelf: (1) open it (2) view its information screen (3) delete it from the bookshelf. The obvious implementation is to have a tile (or as you suggest a button) which when tapped does (1), and to have adjacent buttons that do (2) and (3). Alternatives (which are, apparently metro-consistent, though they seem obscure to me) could be to access (2) and (3) by either tapping the left edge of the list view, or by long-tap/double-tap on book button.

Another area still needing more thought is the UI for interacting with the page. I do think the right thing would be to display some sort of 'tilt' effect when the user taps on the page - but, having only an emulator to work with, I cannot really tell what works for that. When I tried building this functionality, it was jerky and laggy on the emulator; I expect to revisit when equipped with a real phone. I think the UI interactions I need to support are: (1) flick page (2) drag page (3) zoom page [not done yet] (4) follow href (5) find-again on previous search text (6) open annotation (7) tap page edge to go back/forward (8a) open actions screen on a word (8b) open actions screen on empty space. I'm open to suggestions as to how to implement all this - preferably expressed as programmatic actions to be taken in response to the various 'Manipulation' events.

Yes, so far I have just used the controls that actually ship with the SDK (and those don't include toggle and drop down controls). I certainly will switch to using the toggle controls for boolean values; as for drop-downs I am less convinced; I'd want to try them out on a real phone before committing either way. They certainly use less screen real-estate, but they can be confusing and hard to use.

Yes I am using the built-in one. If there is a better alternative, I'll take a look at it. Though if it's a known problem, I might just wait for Microsoft to patch it; I guess we will see which happens first!

Yes that is a feature that exists in the WM6.x version, but it has proved controversial (also it needs careful programming to deal with the case of a corrupt book that can leave the app in an unusable state). It could also cause me problems with meeting the 'must be up and running in 5 seconds from the get-go' app certification requirement, particularly if the book turns out to need downloading over the network. I expect I will implement this behaviour (as an optional setting), but it introduces enough nasty special cases that I decided to leave it out of the initial release.

Sure - as I say, I'd be glad to receive suggestions. Feel free to post here if you want community discussion, or PM/email me (home@jim-chapman.net) if you prefer.

Thanks for using Freda.