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January 31, 2010
 

Monitor your App Engine application from your pocket with Engine Watch for Android

I've just released my second free Android app, called Engine Watch. Engine Watch is a small utility that I wrote to monitor the quotas of my application on the Google App Engine cloud. Multiple accounts can be added and for each account you can select the application and get the current quota statistics, the same statistics you can see on the App Engine dashboard.

You can download engine watch by scanning this barcode:

Engine Watch barcode

or by searching for Engine Watch in the market. Let me know what you think!

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Comments (19)

Feb 01, 2010
ikai said...
This is pretty cool. How'd you do it? Is the source available anywhere?
Feb 01, 2010
Hugo said...
It's pretty easy. For login I use Google ClientLogin and then login to app engine using that. Then it's just a matter of parsing the app engine html and displaying it in a nice way. The source isn't available online, but if you have a specific question I might be able to help you out.
Feb 02, 2010
mcahornsirup said...
Nice, but if you want to support the Android HTC Tattoo, please check the support option for QVGA. Only than it will be available to those users... anyway, NICE!
Feb 02, 2010
Hugo said...
Yes you're right, I'll add the support for other screens tonight.
Feb 02, 2010
illojal said...
Force closes if you try to get qoutas for an app which has not been uploaded yet. And you could use AccountManager and the 1.5/6 version of it instead of letting that user enter credentials themselvs. Should work.
Feb 02, 2010
Hugo said...
Any change you have a log from the force close? Regarding the AccountManager, I'm not sure if there's a public api for 1.5 for that. AccountManager is only available in 2.0 and up and not many devices are running that. I'll look into using AccountManager for devices that support it.
Feb 03, 2010
NM said...
Hi! Congratulations for your work! Wanna know which framework did you use to parse the HTML?
Thanks in advance
NM
Feb 03, 2010
Hugo said...
No frameworks, just plain old regular expressions :)
Feb 03, 2010
NM said...
haha, the power of regular expressions :)
Mar 12, 2010
Alvin said...
It says something is wrong with my google account or I have no appengines connected. I have plenty of appengines connected and I had no problem logging on in the browser or using my gmail app.
Mar 12, 2010
Hugo said...
I love to solve that bug, can you contact met on android at neenbedankt dot com and tell me what device you have and maybe send me some more info?
Mar 26, 2010
e2jk said...
Great app!
When first logging in, it asks for my Google account. I enter it, press OK, and then immediately another popup appears asking me my Google Account... I didn't know if I had entered a wrong password or what, so I pressed cancel, and found my email address was appearing just fine, so I clicked on it and got to see my apps.

Why not directly sending to the user's apps the first time they enter their account? I suppose 95+% of your users will only enter a single account the first time they use your app, at least to test it and see how it works before putting other accounts... The way the app behaves now you are puzzling 95% of your new users, and I guess that's no good ;)

Thanks anyway for the great app! I'd love to have it open source'd, if it wasn't to make sure you are not secretly harvesting everybody's Google Accounts ;) (don't laugh, I'm sure I'm not the only one to have thought about that...)

Mar 26, 2010
e2jk said...
And by the way, I imagine you will see your download numbers rise as you've been mentioned on the App Engine blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/03/app-engine-community-update.html

That's how I found out about your app!

Mar 26, 2010
Hugo said...
The first thing must be a bug, I'll fix that soon. The redirecting thing might be a good Idea. I understand your point on harvesting accounts, I hope devices will be on 2.0 and up soon so that they can use the accounts api so that you do not have to share your password with my app. I do not want your password anyway :)
Mar 26, 2010
e2jk said...
Thanks.

What's your view on opening the code? What are your arguments for not doing it?

The harvesting is only an example, other positive things come out when you open source your app: patches, improvement propositions (and patches), translations, building of a community and thus better discussion with your [users'] community, etc.

In case you change your mind, have a look at https://launchpad.net/ or https://github.com/ ...

Cheers!

Mar 26, 2010
Hugo said...
I'm not opposed to open sourcing it, and I'm still considering it for this app. It's just that I'm not done yet and ready for the source to be out there. That sounds a bit emotional maybe :) For me personally there is no obvious gain in open sourcing it. I get a lot of feedback from users already, which is greatly appreciated. I do not expect to receive many patches or other source contributions, based on open sourcing some other stuff in the past. I think that mostly works for large projects with large communities. So for me there is no immediate gain in open sourcing it.

That said I still think that this will be open source in the few next months or so, depending on how much time I have on my hands etc.

I hope you understand...

Jun 05, 2010
Christa said...
Hello,

I totally understand not wanting to let go of code before you're completely happy with it, but I'm out to learn what I can about GAE/Android interaction and am curious about your methodology.

Any progress on the maybe-releasing-the-code front?

Jun 06, 2010
Hugo said...
Nick has done a pretty good write up on how to authenticate to app engine from Android here http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Authenticating-against-App-Engine-from-an-Andr..., I guess that would be the most challenging part. Thats pretty much how I login to app engine from my app. Then I just scrape html pages to collect the data and display that in the app.
Jun 06, 2010
Christa said...
Aha!

Thank you for the information, and the link.

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