Oslo bysykkel is a service in Oslo, Norway for renting bikes in the city. The racks are located all over the city making it an easy service to use.

14.09.2011 - Available on the Marketplace

The application is now available for free on the marketplace! You can find it by searching for Oslo Bysykkel or by by clicking this link: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=56f3d5f3-7175-48da-bdb0-ee4947c9fd7d 
I hope you enjoy the application just as much as I do when riding the bikes to and from work. :) 

Note: The application is made for Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango). So if you are not running Mango yet, the app will not be visible on the marketplace.

About

I've created a Windows Phone applicaton to view status of the racks and to easily find a free bike or empty lock to return it to. You can see racks close to you, pan around on the map, search for addresses or select a rack from your favorites. The application group rack that are close to each other as these most likely are at the same place or just right across the road. When clicking on a pushpin it will split up into the seperate racks that it has grouped togheter.

The application shows a pushpin for each location with the number of bikes and the number of free locks. (10/7 means there are 10 bikes and 7 free locks)
Since there are over 100 bysykkel racks in Oslo the application had to be able to hold all these pushpins at the same time on the map. This proved quite a challenge as performance starts to drop when reaching 30+ pushpins in the Bing maps control. This is even with bitmap cache enabled as i've blogged about before.

A workaround to this is to hold all the pushpins in a seperate collection. If a pushpin is too far from the view it is removed from the maplayer of the Bing control. The reason for this is that even when hiding the pushpin, the Bing control will still calculate where the pushpin should be on the map.

Preview