Notes on Android Development

In the following I wish to share my experiences in developing and distributing apps for Google’s Android operating system.

My app, QuickTodo, is a basic todo list, a category which was already over subscribed at the point of entry to the Market. It provides notifications of tasks on a given due date. There is also a free version available, with a slightly limited feature set.

Firstly I am going to talk about developing the app, how easy it is to create an app, and mention a few pitfalls along the way. Secondly I will mention the process of adding the app to the Market. Finally I will talk about marketing the app, and what my experience has been in that area.

1. Development.

Getting started with Android development is relatively straightforward. Unlike the iPhone, you can develop on a Mac, PC or Linux machine. You will need to go to the Android SDK page and follow the instructions there. Basically you need to download three things – Eclipse, the Android SDK and the Android Plugins for Eclipse.

Once you have done that, you are presented with the option to create a project in Eclipse to target the Android platform. Development is done in Java, with some major differences in the way that you have to create your code. Several classes are completely gone, and replaced with ones more suitable for a mobile environment. If you have used Java before, you should have no difficulty adapting to the SDK’s way of doing things. Most of the core is there, but the graphical elements, and the way you access SQLite databases is different from the standard Java.

2. Android Market

Adding your app to the Market is relatively straightforward. There is a $25 (£17) charge to sign up, which allows you to upload multiple apps to the Market. The only thing you need to do is make sure that your app is signed before attempting to upload it. Thankfully, the Eclipse plugin helps you out here, by making it relatively easy to sign an app. You have to provide a description for the app, pick a category and set whether the app is paid for or free. You cannot change an app from being free to paid or vice versa after you have chosen this initially, although you can change the price of the app afterwards (paid apps only).

I encountered no problems using the market, or uploading apps. The one downside is that you cannot upload the app from your phone – you have to do it through your computer.

3. Marketing and Sales

This is probably the hardest part to get right. You have to market your app yourself. Google will not do this for you. Also sales are likely to be poor. QuickTodo has only had a handful of sales since its launch a few months ago. Part o the problem I think, is that although you have to have a Google account to use the phone, you have to set up payment separately and a lot of people don’t appear to have done this. Also there are not as many Android devices out there as iPhones for instance, so you will have to work harder at publicising your work.

I would be very interested in other people’s experiences with the Android platform, either as a user, or a developer, or in feedback on my app.

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Notemeister

I have decided that I will take over development of the Notemeister project. In the absence of any contact from the original author, and in note of the fact that the code is licenced under GPLv2, I have created a fork of the project that can be found at http://github.com/robotii/notemeister/tree/master. No changes have been made to the original code as yet, although one thing I’m considering is to change the name of the project.

Future enhancements are likely to include OPML support for exporting and importing, and a general tidy up and freshening of the UI. I would appreciate any ideas or comments on what to do with the project, as there are sure to be some ideas that I haven’t yet thought of.

The original Sourceforge page of the project is here if anyone wants to look and see what the project is all about. I have included the project description below.

Notemeister is a small, simple note organizer made for the GNOME2 desktop. It’s features include:

  • Notes stored in a tree view and structure
  • Drag and drop support for reordering notes
  • Simple text formatting by highlighted bounds
  • Auto-save feature
  • Import/Export to/from text files
  • Link notes to a file on disk

Currently, dependancies include:

  • Python 2.3.3
  • PyGTK >= 2.3.92 (unstable 2.4)
  • PyOrbit 2.0.0
  • GNOME-Python 2.0.2

Currently I am unable to maintain the sourceforge page for the project, so this is a code only fork.

Ideas and suggestions can be posted below until I get a better solution in place.

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Tomboy notes

Currently I am using a tool called Tomboy to store notes and other information. Tomboy allows you to store notes with wiki linking and formatting. There are also plugins that allow you to add sketches to notes, set reminders and add the current time and date to a note.

It is also possible to export notes in various different formats and, thanks to the d-bus interface, possible to interact with Tomboy programmatically. In short Tomboy is an excellent tool for Linux users — and hopefully soon for windows users.

About Tomboy

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux and Unix. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day.

Have you ever felt the frustration at not being able to locate a website you wanted to check out, or find an email you found interesting, or remember an idea about the direction of the political landscape in post-industrial Australia? Or are you one of those desperate souls with home-made, buggy, or not-quite-perfect notes systems?

Time for Tomboy. We bet you’ll be surprised at how well a little application can make life less cluttered and run more smoothly.

Tomboy is currently in pre-release development, but you can still try it out. Tomboy is written in C# and utilizes the Mono runtime and Gtk#. Automatic spell-checking is provided by GtkSpell.

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Getting to comment on other people’s giraffes, like blog posts

Here are my top three tips for getting people to comment on your site. If you think of any others I would be pleased to hear them, and possibly even take your comment on board. Anyway, here they are, even though you must have heard them a million times before, or rather read them. If you can improve on my meager list, I would urge you to do so.

  1. Make it easy for people to post. No one wants to jump through hoops to write a quick comment.
  2. Respond to comments in a personal way. Make your readers feel like they’re part of a community.
  3. Include YOU in your posts so people feel they are reading a real person, which you are… right?

He he, used one of them already. Let me know what you think of the comments system. Anything really, I would like to hear it.

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Another week

Hopefully during the next week I should have time to work on several open source projects for a few days. Trouble is… where is the best place to begin? There are so many good projects out there, covering a wide variety of applications, tools and other things, that it is hard to know where to contribute to make a difference.

What I would be interested in, however, is something that makes organising (yes, this is British English after all :-) information, and retrieving it easier. Unfortunately, there are a number of projects out there, that whilst good, have no intention of moving into the arena I’m interested in. Several of these applications are Tomboy, Labyrinth to name two in particular. Where I would like to see the two of these projects going is in the direction that neither seems to be taking, namely that of allowing information to be structured in a way that mirrors the brain. I would like to see Tomboy develop a viewing layer on top of the xml data that allows data to be viewed in more than one way, perhaps through the use of xslt and plugins designed to be used with this. It would need two way transformation, as well as the ability to edit in any form. I think this is a pretty tall order. However, the program is not currently structured to allow this.

The above is not a criticism as such of Tomboy, for it is far far better than any desktop tool I’ve seen before, but rather an indication of the direction I’d like to see it take. Unfortunately, if you look at the website, it seems to be merely replicating the functionality of a wiki on the desktop, albeit very elegantly. Having said the above, it is a tool I use daily, and is miles ahead of any windows program that attempts to do a similar job.

Labyrinth, which someone has mentioned as a possible link in to tomboy is again another very useful tool, although not yet as mature as Tomboy. When I say mature I mean its practicality in using the tool everyday is not quite as good as Tomboy, although it is still a pretty useful thing.

I particularly like the idea of a labyrinth style display onto files and folders, showing how they are related in a non-hierarchical manner, such as libraries used by this program, source files for it, and header files and so forth.

I hope to write sometime about Beagle, which is a tool I love and hate at the same time. This relationship will become more clear when I have formulated the post.

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