I never quite got into Twitter. The value proposition just wasn’t there for me and it always seemed like a passing thing. Google+ on the other hand has already given me infinite photo storage, I can put animated gifs in my stream (oh the opportunity for last-frame gif bombs!), and I can choose exactly what messages go out to which subscribers based on circles. So I’m on Google+, and that’s where I post a good chunk of my smaller hacks and tidbits of life. Want to know what I’ve been up to between posts? Curious to see my hacks in action? Want to get a sneak peek at my hacks before they’re available to the public? Then you’d better start following me on Google+ hadn’t you? Just head over to profiles.google.com/huntergdavis and add me to a circle today! Need an invite to Google+? Just ask!
I had a YouTube comment a while back ask me for the source code to one of my games, simply so that he could figure out how to add AdMob ads to his own game. For some programmers out there, the real barrier of entry to market seems to be a lack of knowledge on how to add AdMob and Adsense to your application, and how to publish it on the Android Market. It can be a bit of a pain, but once you’ve got it down it’s a straightforward process. I’ve written a detailed tutorial for those who’d rather not have to figure all this out from scratch.
Read on for the full 25 step guide to adding ads and publishing your Android app to market.
I’ve updated some of my Android Apps with the most requested user features.
Easy Inventory has been updated with a “bulk sale” option. Easy File Split and Join has been updated with an advanced multi-join feature, which allows you to join any arbitrary number and type of files together. Easy Pest Control can now set an arbitrary length of playtime. Easy File Encrypt can now batch encrypt or decrypt any number of files.
Today is the first day of August. After two straight months of adding an app a day (A double software Jedi challenge), I’m switching my focus. I got some good advice from folks over at HN in response to a reply I made to an Android post, and some great improvement suggestions from my existing users. After mulling it all over, and looking at my app sales numbers I’ve come to the conclusion that writing an app a day, while certainly possible, is not tenable. Though arguably my overall app quality has improved dramatically, my day-to-day and month-to-month app ad traffic and sales plateaued just after June, and has been slowly declining since. This is even after the rise in popularity of the games I released. As I subsist on my ad traffic and book sales, this trend is quite concerning. Bottom line: though I’ve got another 200 mock-ups and could write an app a day till the end of time it’s never going to make me as much money as my book sales or contract income. It’s not even in the same ballpark.
As such, I’m stopping the app a day. Sixty-five apps in sixty days is still impressive, and as far as I can tell no-one else out there has even released 40 apps in 40 days, let alone 50 or 60. Ever. Anywhere. On any platform. Even just scripts. As of today I’m going to claim the Jedi (or Sith) challenge master crown until someone else attempts to do 66 (or greater) apps in 66 days. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing apps, or releasing cool research tech for the Android platform. Just not every day. As an added bonus, this will free up time for me to update my previous apps and brainstorm really good app ideas.
Super Whistle is the culmination of everything I learned from my mega popular “Easy Whistle” series of apps. With presets for dozens of animal, insect, and reptile species and the ability to adjust your playback time, Super Whistle is a super deal at 99c.
You can view more about Super Whistle from the permalink page here, or buy Super Whistle from the Android Market here.
Here’s a fun one I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It’s like mail goggles, but without requiring access to Gmail.
Sober Secrets is a fast and free application to keep secrets from your (drunken) self. Sober Secrets makes you correctly and timely solve a math problem before it will show you it’s hidden notepad. Use it to store your ex’s phone number, the number to that “oh so bad for you but oh so good when you’re drunk” delivery place, or even the recipe to your favorite dish (one should probably not use the oven when inebriated). Just make sure you can answer in under 8 seconds when you are sober!
You can view more at the permalink page for it here, or download Sober Secrets from the Android Marketplace here.
I’ve been writing programs for twenty years now, and writing about the process for at least ten. While I’ve written a few articles on mobile programming in general, I haven’t really written anything about the process of developing for Android. I certainly haven’t shown anyone publicly. While I was supremely confident for many years (even before grad school) that my C/C++ skills were mighty mean, I’ve only been writing Java/Android apps for about 6 weeks now. As such when it comes to the tools of the Android trade, I (and I assume many folks out there) are still getting it right. Though I’ve built myself up a nice little corpus of Android apps in this time (55 and a couple of games as of yesterday), the real elegance and nuance of development on the platform won’t come through in my daily process for some time yet. I still run into a lot of “simple” problems, and have a great bit of room for improvement. As such I feel it’s the perfect time to give a peek into my development process. I took a 6-hour time lapse video of my development laptop in its entirety, with one screenshot being taken every ten seconds. Enable YouTube annotations to enable my running commentary.
This came out to be a one minute and 38 second video, which encompasses the development of Skillful Surround (released in the app store 7/19/2011) in its entirety. From start to finish, I modify a basic panel class (from my previous work, but you can grab one from the lunar lander android example) into a puzzle game “Skillful Surround”. This unedited view includes my development (and publishing) process with warts and all. I design graphics, code around bugs and limitations, research problems on stack exchange, make big mistakes and re-do simple functions etc. For anyone looking to get into Android development, it should be a refreshingly honest portal into the process. I use no custom software, nor commercial software other than the cursed OS that came on my laptop. I should have rebooted into Ubuntu before I ran Eclipse (Eclipse, the Android SDK, Filezilla and chromium are all available on Linux too, of course), but I was still waking up when the idea came to me.
Easy File Encrypt is a fast and free app which allows you to encrypt and decrypt files on the go! Set your own AES cypher password, and your file will be encrypted. Now no-one can decrypt the file without knowing the password!
You can view the permalink page here, or download Easy File Encrypt from the Android Market here.
Easy File Scramble is a fast and free app to scramble and de-scramble files. This prevents the files from being opened in file viewers, zip extractors, etc. Easy File Scramble uses a two-way encoding algorithm, so there is no extra data stored about the files encoded and Easy File Scramble has no knowledge of whether a file is being encoded or decoded.
You can view the permalink page here, or download Easy File Scramble on the Android Market here.
Easy Image Stamp is a fast and free app which allows you to “stamp” image onto a canvas. It fully supports alpha transparancy and pixel blending in images, so you can stamp rounded corners to your hearts delight. You can load an image in as a background, or just stamp images onto a blank canvas. You can use this to generate lolcat memes, edit photographs, cencor photos, make photo collages, and more. It also features the almighty undo button!
You can view the permalink page for it here, or download it from the Android Market here.
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