Autosport for Android

Posted by on April 14th, 2011 in android autosport work

The final application I worked on as an employee of Rapid-Mobile was released last month, in time for the start of the F1 season. It was an Android application for Autosport. The project was in essence a port of the iPhone application we had previously built; but we updated a few screens, corrected some mistakes and gave it an android look and feel. Unusually for a software project it ran to schedule, and was completed on time without any issues. It definitely helped that the guys at Autosport where so easy to reach and knew what they wanted.

This was actually my first foray into Android development (BobClockD3 came after), I had owned a G1 from release but I had never had a chance to try out developing for it. My tasks at work were mostly focused on iPhone and backend server development at the time. This was driven by market demand, in that there was no demand for Android development. That demand is now shifting to having a presence on all the popular smart phones, though Apple is still the primary target because their users seem more open to paying money for applications. Hopefully my new position at Rank will lead to more Android work.

Let them have colour

Posted by on March 10th, 2011 in android bobclockd3 development

Yesterday I pushed out an update for BobClockD3 to github and XDA. Incase you don't know what BobClockD3 is, it is the large clock widget in the following screenshot.

You can read more about it in my project section - [BobClockD3] (http://bobstuff.org/projects/bobclockd3/)

Since I first released BobClockD3 the number one request has been for custom colour selection, well finally BobClockD3 has the ability to customise its colour scheme. Woooo. It was impressive to see the number of people who would go to the effort of pulling apart an apk, decompiling resources, modifying them and then repackaging just to release custom coloured versions. But it wasn't the best of solutions, now it's easy to do from the preference panel colour picker. Rather than writing a colour picker I chose to use the version by github user attenzione (direct link). It was a very nice looking preference panel, worked in 1.6 and was opensource. Screenshot shows the colour picker integrated into BobClockD3 configuration screen.

Integration was simple, a couple of options in eclipse and it was done. But distributing this in the BobClockD3 github is going to be more complicated. Currently android libraries can only be distributed as source not packages, so it appears my only option is to write instructions in my readme to explain checking out this dependency and setting up eclipse/commandline. But that's a topic for another post.

Also in this build I replaced the old preference like activity with a nice new actual preference activity. With shiny buttons provided by Dan and cleaned up text I think it actually looks nice for a configuration screen. Other new features I added included functionality to launch a clock application when selected, an option to set all text to lowercase and the infamous 12-midnight-00 hour fix. For some reason in my original release I had written extra code just to convert 12 to 00 for midnight because I was under some strange illusion that was correct.

Github link - https://github.com/bobthekingofegypt/BobClockD3

Direct download link - BobClockD3 version 1.0

My plan now is to release this version into the market, if their are no bugs reported maybe this weekend. We will see how that works out.