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.
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
Episode II: Return of a freelancer
The change has finally come – for both me and my blog. I am back to freelancing after working at Infosys for two years. The primary reason being lack of time to concentrate on things I wanted. I’ve learnt a lot of things in my time at Infy and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Leaving it was a toughest decision I had to make till now, but I’m glad that I will be getting more time to work on my ideas now. With this, there begins a new episode of my career.
As for my blog, after so much time spent on my blog’s design, I turned out to be a less-than-average designer (not to mention, too much of a critic) and didn’t like any of my designs. So, I modified The Theme Foundry’s Traction theme a little bit. I will introduce little functional enhancements going forward but, now the website has reached a stable point in terms of look-and-feel.
P.S. – As I have more time on my hands now, I will be posting more on my blog about my experiments with Android, Javascript and more.
Google Wave: First impressions
Today, I saw a news story on Engadget informing that Google Wave beta started and invites were sent to 100,000 users. I was disappointed to know that I was not one of them. As it turns out, I am. I just got my Google Wave invitation.
First impressions: neat and user friendly. I’ll ‘collaborate’ with some of my friends and post my opinions.
Update [October 3, 2009]: After sending out invites to my friends and colleagues, it seems they still haven’t received it. According to the note on the invite page – “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”. Well, we understand it Google but, how many days will it take to “lick a lot of stamps”, huh??
Update [October 9, 2009]: Google finally sent out invites that I sent a few days back. I still have some invites left. Let me know if you want one.
Google introduces a “Simple” language for Android
I came across a blog post announcing Release of Simple, which is a language based on BASIC. Simple google code page (pun intended) has binary distributions available for download for Windows, Linux and Mac. Author has updated it with a couple of sample applications and a bunch of Reference pages in its Wiki. It is well-suited for “non-professional” programmers who want to develop applications on Android. If you ask me, it’s a remote possibility. But, it is a good gesture from Google to encourage adaptation of Android.
Google officially announced Chrome OS for Netbooks
Google announced Chrome OS on official Google Blog today. There were many rumors of a Google OS in development. After a long waiting period, Google has made this official. The OS is meant to be light and it is targeted at Netbooks. According to the blog post, it will support both x86 and ARM architectures. Google is planning to make Chrome OS available to consumers in “Second half of 2010″.
According to trends, my assumption is Chrome OS will be faster loading OS with offline version of Google Apps Suite and of course, Google Chrome browser. Too bad, we have to wait at least a year for it.
A new beginning
Starting a new technical blog. I will be posting all my technical experiments/write-ups/articles here from now on. My general blog will continue functioning with an occassional post Here.
Also coming up with a new website here with all my personal development work and a little profile of myself for a start.