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August 19, 2010

31

Birthdays Released on Android Market

Yesterday, I released my first Android application on Android Market – Birthdays. It is a birthday reminder application which syncs all your contacts’ birthdays to your calendar.

One can say that I’m a forgetful person and while there are some advantages of this situation, I often forget birthdays of people who matter. As a solution to this, I started maintaining birthdate of a person into his/her contact. Back then, I had just bought an iPhone and I was pleased that it had a “Birthday” field in the address book. I didn’t hesitate paying $0.99 for a birthday reminder app which didn’t exactly “remind” me (iPhone didn’t support Push notifications or Calendar sync back then).To be exact, it helped only a little if at all.

In the same time period, I was also excited about Android as a development platform. When I got my first Android device, I tried out a few birthday reminder apps already available. Most of them didn’t work as I expected them to. While some did, they relied on a background service for notifications which will keep running at all times. So, I decided to start the development of yet another birthday reminder application which will get the job done while not being a resource-hog. While the journey of the development was quite educational, it was easier than I initially thought (probably because of a slight change in my job description). I still can’t believe it took me a year to develop and publish my first “real” application.

So, what’s next? The application is still very basic. I am going to explore android SDK some more by adding new features like facebook sync, two-way contact sync etc. I have had a lot of help from Android developer community so, I am going to write a few blog posts explaining some issues I faced in the development of this application as my contribution. I am also planning to open the source to public as soon as I am done with implementing all the features I have in my mind. The application source can be accessed from Github.

QR Code
If you haven’t yet tried it, give it a spin by downloading it from the Market. Do provide your feedback via comments below so that I can improve it further and make it more user-friendly.

A feature suggestion is also welcome. I will implement it as I get time to spare.

Note: Because of a major bug, all the calendar events created by Birthdays are being removed by Android upon reboot. I am working on an alternate way to sync the calendar. Please bear with me until I release a fix.

Changelog:

Birthdays v1.2 R6 (September 20, 2010):

  • Fixed the “Invalid Birthday” issue
  • Fixed crashes on Droid X
  • Corrected calendar event dates
  • Better calendar cleanup
  • A few minor bugfixes

Birthdays v1.1.beta (August 21, 2010):

  • Fixed the crash for non-HTC devices

Birthdays v1.0.beta (August 18, 2010):

  • Initial release
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  • Benno

    Hi,

    I very much like the idea of this app: creating a new “birthdays” calendar resource instead of writing the dates into one of the existing calendars.

    Unfortunately, the app is still useless for me at the moment because of a bug: all the birthday events in the calendar are one day early…

    Feature suggestion: Add the age of the person to the calendar entries.

    If you plan to open source the app (which I appreciate expressively), I suggest releasing the code as soon as possible. Open Source works best if the code is published early…

    Best wishes from Germany,

    Benno

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    Hi Benno,

    Thank you for your valuable feedback and suggestion. A couple of users have already reported the issue where the calendar events are one day early. As it seems, this issue exists only for european users. I am working to fix this issue with a couple other improvements. I will release the source as soon as the application goes stable.

    Thanks,
    Rakshit

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  • Bas Bakker

    Hi, since the app is opensource now, are you still buzy fixing it ?
    I really like your app but the 1 day early buy is pretty anoying ;)

    Thanks for all your work!

    Regards Bas.

  • Bas Bakker

    Hi, since the app is opensource now, are you still buzy fixing it ?
    I really like your app but the 1 day early buy is pretty anoying ;)

    Thanks for all your work!

    Regards Bas.

  • Rakshit Menpara

    @Bas, I didn’t make it open source because I was done with it. I will still be fixing and improving it. THe promised bugfixes and updates are coming soon :)

  • Rakshit Menpara

    @Bas, I didn’t make it open source because I was done with it. I will still be fixing and improving it. THe promised bugfixes and updates are coming soon :)

  • Bas Bakker

    Awesome, I almost can’t wait :D
    I realy like the app because it is really straightforward. I just does what it does and pretty good (except the little day bug).

    One request. When you start the program you see the overview of birthdays. Is it possible to add the date’s of the people somewhere maybe?
    Now it sais: Name – turning xx in xx days.
    The exact date would be nice.

    One little other thingy: When you tab a name it takes you to the Edit birthday field. This field always start at present day. It would be nice if it starts at the persons birthday.

    Regards. Bas.

  • Bas Bakker

    Awesome, I almost can’t wait :D
    I realy like the app because it is really straightforward. I just does what it does and pretty good (except the little day bug).

    One request. When you start the program you see the overview of birthdays. Is it possible to add the date’s of the people somewhere maybe?
    Now it sais: Name – turning xx in xx days.
    The exact date would be nice.

    One little other thingy: When you tab a name it takes you to the Edit birthday field. This field always start at present day. It would be nice if it starts at the persons birthday.

    Regards. Bas.

  • Paul

    Does the app support desire? It don’t seem to work for me!

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    Actually, I have developed and tested it on my Desire running official Froyo. Can you elaborate your problem?

  • Paul

    I will explaine in detail then. I am also running Froyo.

    I have my contacts as Exchange Contacts, Google Contacts and Phone Contacts.

    The birthday of my exchange contacts is allready shown in the calendar as they can be syncronized via the desktop application and hence shown in the phone calendar as well as the Outlook Client on my desktop.

    I would like the phone and google contacts to be shown in the calendar as well.

    When I installed the app it also loaded every birthday information from exchange, google and phone contact. So far everything works fine.

    I then tried to syncronize. The app was working for a short file and a message appeared in the top saying syncronizing was completed. But nothing has happened to my calendar. Birthday events are not shown in the calendar.

    I wonder if I have to adjust something in my calendar settings so that it shows events – or there might be something wrong with the app and my settings ?

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    Hi Paul,

    I am sorry for your inconvenience. I have not been able to reproduce your issue on my device or emulator. I have made a some changes after assuming certain things. The update has been released to the market. Please let me know if your issue persists.

    Regards,
    Rakshit

  • Bas Bakker

    Nice update! days are good now.
    I only have the same issue as Paul. Sync is working nice but doesn’t add the birthdays to the phone calender on my device.
    I have a Legend.

    Keep up the good work!
    regards, Bas

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    One more update. Sorry for the inconvenience guys.

  • Bas Bakker

    With the new update the calender sync works good!
    Great work.

  • Bas Bakker

    Hmm, and suddenly my calender has forgotten all the dates again.
    I am puzzled why this happens.. its odd.

    Anyway, you are on the right track :)
    regards, Bas

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    I’m not sure what is happening. Did all of it went away without syncing using the app? Can you see the Birthdays calendar in your calendar list?

  • Bas Bakker

    When I updated the app, all the birthdays where in my agenda again.
    When I checked it an hour later they where gona again.

    When the app is running and has an icon in the taskbar the section ‘ birthdays’ exists in my agenda. But no dates..
    When the app is not running the section ‘birthdays’ is not visible anymore in the agendas.

    I hope this clears things up.. If not. ask me anything you like to know.

    Regards.

  • Bas Bakker

    I found a small bug.
    My own birthday give me: Invalid Birthday
    This is a new bug I guess.

    Regards Bas.

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    It will display “Invalid Birthday” if it failed to parse the date. This usually happens with dates without a year. For now, resetting it using Edit dialog should resolve the issue.

  • Bas Bakker

    I checked if my birthday has a year in it. It does have a year.
    When I try reset it with the Edit dialog the program chrashes.

    The application Birthdays (proces com.rexenpara.birthdays) stopped. try again.

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    That seems like a new bug. I’ll have to look into it. BTW, doesn’t it offer to report the error? It would be very helpful.

  • Bas Bakker

    No it doesn’t offer to report the error. I can only press: Close now

    When I press my own birthday. It crashes right away. It doesn’t take me to my birthday settings.
    Then the program starts automaticly again.

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    Finally figured out the issue. The latest update should fix it. Thank you for your patience :)

  • Bas Bakker

    I was working all sweet and stuff but when I rebooted my phone all the dates vanished from my calender again.
    I can’t figure out why.
    In my calender [GOOGLE] Birthdays was not visible after reboot.
    When I start Birthdays it becomes visible as option (to enable) in calenders again but I won;t show me the birthdays in the calender again.

    A solution is uninstall Birthdays, then install, then sync again.. but this is not the best solution obviously ;)

    Bas.

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    Thanks for reporting it. When I tried it on my phone, my calendars got deleted, too. I will soon come up with a fix.

  • Bas Bakker

    Yeah to bad.. but other than that it works sweet and simple :)

  • Entrup

    First time syncing it works great: I could see the birthdays at the calendar. I synced again and now the calendar doesn´t show birthdays.

  • http://www.rakshitmenpara.com deltasquare4

    I am still looking for an better way to sync Birthdays to the calendar. It seems Android clears up all the events/calendars created using technique I am currently using. I will come up with a better solution soon.

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