Friday 22 April 2011

Migrated

I started developing these android applications on windows 7 but have recently migrated to Ubuntu and  found the experience to be identical if not better  this is mostly down to the use of the eclipse IDE i think.

A sounboard.....

Im going to mention this application despite being thoroughly disappointed in its quality after putting it out, it was the first app to cause me a real headache in creating for many reason.

The application was intended to be a blank soundboard which users can record onto themselves for the creation of custom soundboards,the result though basically functional is not as graceful as i had wanted.

1. it has a lot of buttons which makes it absolutely enraging to use on a small device like a phone and quite ugly.

2. It was the first application i made using multiple activities which took me a while to get right.

3.Most soundboards can play multiple sounds simultaneously the only consequences  being that  it doesn't sound to great, my soundboard can only play one sound at a time, attempting to play another sound will knock of what ever is currently playing before it starts to play, i had attempted to get more than one MediaPlayer  working simultaneously but this only led to crashes.




Above is the main activity screen which allows a user to record/playback sounds stored at each button the horrific panel  i created  is running in an emulator , anyone with fingers larger that that of a small child will  find it impossible to use.

This screen is the secondary activity i added, its a ListView of all the sounds and allows the user to to set sounds and can be used to set a recorded sound as the ring tone for the phone via android.settings , it also makes use of the alert dialog to inform the user when they have set the tone, as you can see having just the numbers in those spaces on the left of the screen makes very inefficient use of the screen space, it also takes a while to scroll the whole thing.

From doing this app i have learned(apart from the use of mediarecorder and mediaplayer)  that Gui design and foresight is important to say the least, regardless of how many amazing features or function an application has , if the interface is bad it may as well not work.

Friday 8 April 2011

PrimeWizard (my first non hello world android app)

Ok decided to post some of the details on the first android application i made, http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/tools/prime-wizardadmob_kres.html  a simple app for finding prime numbers, i made this in order to get a grasp of how to build functioning GUI's in android and as a test to go through the process of getting something on the marketplace.


The Code i used for finding if a number is a prime or not  was a simple loop i made originally to solve a puzzle in project Euler http://projecteuler.net/ .





This is how the start of the program appears a simple XML layout of buttons to select the language you want to use, for this i just used google translate, unfortunately you have to select your language every time, something some users complained about.
 An now for a shot of the functioning application, you enter in a number in the textbox at the top of the screen and then press the button below, the program will return a true or false result and also give you the nearest prime numbers above and below the number you have chosen.


The program Works but does have some flaws, i could have spent longer on the  GUI to make it more pretty and the size of the searchable numbers is limited to the size of 32 bit long integers, but if your going to be looking for larger primes you would probably want to use something more powerful than a smartphone.