I just came across a very cool website. It’s a web front-end to the Android market. The best thing about it is the rss feeds. Now i can just subscribe and see the new apps flow in without having to constantly check the app store on my phone. Brilliant site. Thank you Jay Freeman.
Update: Cyrket is dead! But not to fear. There’s another site that does the same thing, and it also has RSS feeds for all the apps: http://www.androlib.com/
Have you ever worked on a project on your own time just for fun and then had it go horribly wrong? I started work on a project for my Android phone that dovetails nicely with the project i’m doing at work. Unfortunately, my boss got a little overly excited about it and sent an email to the executives telling them all about this cool side-project i’m working on and now their expectations are set that it’ll be this great thing. Suddenly something i was just doing for fun is now an obligation with unrealistic expectations. And to further complicate the issue, i’ve run into a technical difficulty which could take a long time to resolve. And it’s not something i really even want to delve into. If i’m doing a project for fun at home, it should be fun. I just don’t see this going anywhere, and i don’t want to continue doing it. Thus my grumpy mood as i try to decide how to proceed.
For the past few months i’ve been working on an application using the Android platform (the gPhone). It’s a remake of a great game i use to play on my Palm and still play on my desktop in the palm simulator all the time called Shisensho. Since i liked it so much i figured “why not recreate it for my new android phone?”
The comments are pretty much as expected. Some people are just spam – all the apps get that. And there are many comments about “i don’t like it, the tiles are too small”. That was totally expected. I thought long and hard about how to deal with that, and in the end decided that there was no good solution – i can’t remove the number of tiles without changing the mechanics of the game, and i can’t make them bigger without only showing a subset of the board (which would change the dynamics of the game as well). So i opted for a unique input method. Rather than select what you actually pressed on, i am selecting the tile above where you press. That way you can see what you’ve selected. As expected here, many people don’t get that and think that the tile selection is “off”. Maybe i’ll make a preference selection so that you can either select above or at your click.
In any event, it’s kind of fun to see reactions. Mostly positive, a few negative (you can’t please everyone). Since i mostly just made the game for my own use, i don’t really mind if anyone else likes it or not. If they do, great. If not, oh well, i’m sure they’ll uninstall it
Ok, almost the coolest app i’ve found yet for my android g1 … the TunesRemote. It connects over wi-fi and allows you to control your itunes music library from your phone. (coolest app is the compareanywhere barcode scanner – which, btw, was written by the same guy). – Tunes Remote
In other android news, i’m making great progress on my game. it’s completely playable, works great, and is quite responsive. the only things left are extras like high score lists, save/restore game state between app runs, an extra tileset, and a page with instructions. hopefully i’ll have it ready to go within a week or two. Oh, also in android market news: here’s a great site to check in addition to the official market: http://www.androidapps.org/