I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last several weeks working on a Flickr app for Windows Phone 7.  I was getting really close to having something to release to the Marketplace but then last night Flickr announced that they’re releasing an official app for both WP7 and Windows 7.  Immediately after watching the video highlighting the features of the apps I decided to stop working on mine.

I was really happy with how my app was shaping up.  It was interesting to see how many of our design decisions matched up.  We both displayed interesting (explored) images, “my” images, and recent images from contacts in a panorama.  For the photo view page I was using a pivot control with two items.  The first contained details such as the preview image, title, upload date, and description.  The second item was going to list comments.  I was even thinking about including a map for geotagged images.

Ultimately though, I’m just one person and they’re, well… Yahoo!  As nice as my app was turning out I just don’t have the resources to pull off anything near what they’re doing with Azure – mainly a live tile and cloud based state management.  If the official apps work anything like what the video shows when they’re released on January 31 they’ll quickly become my go-to resources for all things flickr.

So even though I won’t be putting a flickr app into the Windows Phone Marketplace the project wasn’t a total wash.  Until starting this project I didn’t really have any opportunity to work with Silverlight.  By extension, I’ve never really done anything with XAML or the MVVM pattern either.  Naturally, this project also taught me a lot about the flickr API since I chose not to use the Flickr.NET library.

Of course, I’ve already paid the developer registration fee so now I need to think of something else to build.  In the meantime though I’ll be looking forward to the release of the official apps.