55 articles Tag android

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

by on February 1, 2010,

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.

Enginewatch

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!

Rainy Days 1.4: Pause your Rain + USA coverage

by on January 24, 2010,

I’m happy to announce a new update to Rainy Days! This version adds new features, improvements, more coverage and bugfixes. One of the new features is the so called stop-and-go mode, where you can pause the animation by tapping the screen once.
Once paused you just swipe left to go back in the animation (earlier) or swipe right to go forward (later). You can also use the trackball or the menu to control the animation.

I’ve also added “quick zoom” to quickly zoom in or out. The search key on the device can also be used for quick zooming.

Ofcourse I’ve also added new coverage: Rainy Days can now display the USA rainfall images and I also added the Balkan area.

Rd-balkan
Pausemode
Pastedgraphic-1

See the full gallery on Posterous

I also made a small demo video and as some people say: I’d love to show it to you :) I have fun with this new version!

Market barcode:
Rainy Days barcode

Reaching your Android users

by on January 8, 2010,

Now that I’ve released my android app to the market it’s time to optimize :) I’d like my app to work on every device and I also would like every user to love it ofcourse. But this is not as easy as it seems…

For example, while the Android Market allows a user to comment on my app it doesn’t allow me to respond, moderate or even view all the comments from the market developer website. It is really hard to monitor the comments and ratings that users give my app, which is frustrating too as some users just use the one-star-does-not-work method when rating your app.

From within your app there are several options. One approach is to collect crash reports and send them to a server somewhere but to me this is a bit too much of a “while you are not watching” thing. One other approach is to use tools like log collector and kindly ask a user to take action.

But still the problem remains: how do you get a user to actually tell you that something is broken? If you are an android dev, how do you manage this? If you are a user, what would you like?

Let me know…

Hello Scandinavia! Rainy Days update adds more coverage

by on January 3, 2010,

I’ve released another update for Rainy Days in the Android market, this time adding Scandinavia coverage, courtesy of vaderradar.se.
This new version also has other improvements and fixes, like new about screens and better management of the download cache. Also credits for the images are now displayed on the map in the bottom right corner.

As usual here are some screenshots and the barcode for downloading the app from the market. Have fun and let me know if you like Rainy Days by rating it in the market for example.

Rd1
Rd2
Rd3

See the full gallery on Posterous

Rainy Days barcode

Rainy Days in Scandinavia preview

by on January 2, 2010,

Here’s a quick preview of the Scandinavian coverage in Rainy Days!

Pastedgraphic-1

Updated Rainy Days availablity in the market

by on December 21, 2009,

I’m getting some negative comments on the fact that there’s no rainfall image data available yet for a lot of places in the world. I hope you all understand that I’m doing this for free, in my spare time and that getting new image data is not as easy as it seems. There’s a lot of work into making the data show perfect on the maps, while dealing with the challenges of a resource limited device.

I understand however that some of you might be disappointed that Rainy Days is not (yet) working for your area, so I have now limited the availablity of my app to the countries that do have at least some coverage. As I add new coverage I’ll add more market locations.

Please do comment on this, because I really like to hear from you. Thanks!

Rainy Days 1.2 released

by on December 20, 2009,

Another release of Rainy Days has been published in the market! It took a little while longer than I anticipated, but I think it was worth the wait.

In this version I’ve added rainfall data for a large part of Europe. When you pan and zoom the map the best image for your location will be selected. If you zoom out you’ll get the Europe rainfall data, and when you zoom in to The Netherlands you’ll get the more detailed rainfall prediction. When there is no data available it will now be visible in the screen, and not the time display for some part of the world you don’t live in :) Other changes include:

  • Better placing of the rainfall images on the map (more accurate)
  • Show my location feature that will, ehm, show your location on the map
  • Animation speed is configurable now
  • Clouds now look prettier at high zoomlevels
  • Experimental mode for Android devices that didn’t show any images previously. (this might be still be a lit buggy and is less pretty than normal mode).

But the biggest change are in the internals of the application. I’ll keep working on adding more coverage, I hope to report on that soon.

Check out the screenshots below and get the new version from the market using the barcode scanner, or by simply searching for Rainy Days. Enjoy!

Rdeurope
Rdanim
Rdlocation
Rdabout

See the full gallery on Posterous

Rainy Days barcode

Preview: Snow and rain over Europe with Rainy Days

by on December 20, 2009,

Here’s a sneak preview showing an update for Rainy Days that I’m working on. The most obvious feature is the Europe coverage, but I’ve included other improvements too, which I’ll blog about later.

Pastedgraphic-1

Help me fixing Rainy Days on Samsung Galaxy

by on December 13, 2009,

I’m getting some reports that Rainy Days is not working right or at all on the Samsung Galaxy (Spica). Unfortunately I don’t have access to that phone, so I’m looking for peope who can help me to debug issues. If you have installed Rainy Days on your Galaxy and all is working fine, I’d like to know too!

If Rainy Days is acting strange on your phone, please help me by sending a log of the phone to android (at) neenbedankt dot com. To send me a log download Log Collector from Xtralogic. First run Rainy Days, wait a minute or so and then use Log Collector to send the log by mail to me. Please send me the entire log, not only the snippets you think are interesting.

Here’s the bar code for Log Collector:

Android talk at the Java Night

by on December 3, 2009,

Next monday (dec 7th) I’ll be giving a 15 minute talk about Android architecture at the Capgemini Java Night. It will be a quick overview of Android, followed by a demo, for which I hacked up a quick presentation system so that I can show what’s going on on my Hero on the projector screen. Maybe I’ll see you there then :)

Meanwhile I’m still working on the next Rainy Days version. I have been working around some limitations of the Android component that I use to show the animated overlays and I’ve further prepared the code so that I can expand the coverage. So I hope to bring more rain in a place near to you soon :)