Android – jebware.com

On Third-Party Android Markets

I’m not sure what happened in the last two weeks, but I got directly contacted by three different companies. All three have third-party Android markets, and they wanted me to participate. That’s all well and good; I have a moderately successful freeware app, so I’m getting used to companies emailing me out of the blue to tell me about their Android-related products. Two of these companies started with short email pitches of why I should participate, and left the ball in my court to act. I’m not going to name these companies here, so that their names aren’t associated in any way with what comes next. When I found some time, I looked at what they had built, read through their developer agreements, and signed up. Win-win.

Appslib, on the other hand, is wildly unprofessional. Here’s the first email
Well that’s interesting, I certainly didn’t sign up for any account on my own. I would have remembered that. I’ll just ignore them and hope they go away.
Thanks for posting my application? I didn’t post a thing. This is getting pretty pushy.
Huh. I’m glad to know my app runs on tablets, even though I didn’t ask for it to be tested. At least they’re waiting for my confirmation to publish the app. Let’s just search their listings to be sure. Nope. They lied again. They stole my app and published it without my consent. Well, they have a Twitter account and it’s active, so I’ll tweet at them asking what gives….

Crickets…

No response on the twitters. I guess they just don’t care. They’ve already put my app out there, as though I had signed up with them (I didn’t), agreed to their Developer Agreement (I didn’t) or published my app to their market (I didn’t). With dishonesty like this throughout their business, I’m going to assume that the whole thing is a fraud, and recommend to other developers and to consumers to steer clear of Applib, they’ll probably steal from you, too.

Please let me know if this happened to you, too. We need to fight back on this. Publishers can’t just take our hard work and do with it as they please. It’s theft. And it’s wrong.

Virginia Traffic 1.2 Release – Feature Update

With this release, the app highlights road names for easier reading on-the-go. A sample:

Also, with this release the app pulls data from a much more stable server, and I fixed a few bugs in the timestamp handling.

Virginia Traffic 1.1.1 Release – Bugfix

Today I’m releasing an update (version 1.1.1) to the Virginia Traffic app which fixes a small bug that had been bothering me for a while. Here’s a quick shot of what the bug looked like before:

As you can see, the incident list had moved up to obscure the dropdown and button at the top. Now here’s what the screen is supposed to look like:

If you’re not an Android developer, thanks for dropping by, and you can stop reading here. The bug is fixed, so please continue to enjoy Virginia Traffic. If you want to know the geeky details, keep going…

I have one big LinearLayout that encompasses the whole screen for the main Activity, and I had previous set the android:clipChildren property to false. Ooops. If you look at the documentation, this means that child objects aren’t being limited to drawing within their bounds. So I had a ListView that was coloring outside the lines, so to speak. Every time I scrolled the ListView, I think it had some trouble syncing up between the exact position of the screen and due to some rendering issue was drawing outside of its boundaries in an attempt to have a smoother draw of the ListView. Setting android:clipChildren to true fixed the problem.

Virginia Traffic 1.1 Release

I’ve just uploaded a new release. Here are the major changes:

The application saves your region selection.
Refresh now works the way you would expect it to. You click refresh, it refreshes.

Virginia Traffic 1.0.1 Bugfix Release

I just released an upgrade to the app. Here are the two bugs that are fixed:

Sometimes in the list view, many of the incidents would be displayed twice each.
For certain incidents, the detailed description would be either incomplete or the wrong description.

200 downloads in 24 hours

Wow, I’m completely surprised by the amount of downloads I’ve had in just one day since releasing the VA Traffic app. Now I’m really encouraged to either (1) expand to more states or (2) make a clone of the app for the iPhone.

And at some point I’ll have to move the server-side stuff to something a little more robust than my desktop.

Virginia Traffic 1.0 Release (Free!)

Ever been stuck in traffic, but the 511 voice prompts think that “The Midtown Tunnel” really means “Burke, Virginia”? Been there.

Now, as long as you’ve got a data connection, you can view all current 511 traffic alerts, by region. There’s two main screens to the app. First, there’s the list of current alerts. Use the dropdown at the top to select your region. The refresh button is, I hope, self-explanatory.

If you click on of the events, you can see all of the details on it, including a more detailed description, as provided by the 511virginia.org website. Hit your back button to return to the main screen.

That’s all for now. It’s no-frills, text only. Here’s the link to download it.

Feedback is welcome. Enjoy!