MyNotes reaches 3100+ users
Now at version 2.3, MyNotes has over 3100 active users. Thanks to everyone for using MyNotes, and a special thanks goes out to those who have contacted me with suggestions to improve the app.
The last few releases have contained some fairly minor updates such as persisting settings across sessions, and improving the look of the interface on larger/smaller screens. If you have any suggestions or general comments, please don’t be shy about leaving a comment here.
MyNotes Hits 2500 Users
MyNotes has now reached 2500 currently installed users! Thanks for the support everyone.
MyNotes Bug Fix: 2.0.1 released
MyNotes version 2.0.1 has been released today to fix a minor bug that was occuring when the notes list is sorted alphabetically. Anytime this occurred a dialog would pop up confirming the removal of a note’s password – oops. Nothing of harm could actually occur, but it was rather annoying. Enjoy!
MyNotes Hits 2000+ Users
For the first time today, the Android Market reported MyNotes as having over 2000 active users! Thanks to everyone who is using it and a special thanks to those who have provided feedback and suggestions for improvement. Let’s go for 3000!
MyNotes 2.0 Released!
MyNotes version 2.0 is now available in the app market, gratis! One of the features that was added is one that lots of people have been asking for – support for editing notes in landscape or portrait orientation without having to restart the app.
The other main feature that was added is password protection. Individual notes that contain sensitive information can now be locked. Here are a couple of screenshots:
MyNotes
Well, now that my new notes app for Android (aptly named MyNotes) is at version 1.6 and what I consider to be stable, I’d like to post up a bit of information about it. MyNotes is a full-featured app designed to help the user remember important bits of information. MyNotes was designed with the intention of keeping the user interface simple, clean, and intuitive. Some of the more notable features are as follows:
- Note tagging
- Search by tag
- Send a note as an email/sms
- Notification bar reminders
- Export to SD card
Screenshots:
Punt block: Google
I have some good news to share; the development of Excursional version 1.0 is finally complete! All the mapping features are working, trips can be saved and reviewed, photos can be viewed independently or in a gallery. It’s all ready to go.
Now to the bad news. Since Google hasn’t gotten around to allowing Canadian developers to post paid apps, I’m now blocked. If you think I’m frustrated, I can’t even imagine what Canadian owners of Android phones must feel – they can’t download ANY paid apps. I realize that Google likely has a load of legal battles to wade through before they can allow Canadians access to paid content, but to be cutting off access to important functionality for a fairly large market of users is in my opinion a poor choice, at best. They’d better get their act together soon or they’ll risk losing many disgruntled users.
– Allan
Photo features now functional!
Well, with a lot of hard work I’ve finally managed to get all of the photo-related features I wanted into Excursional. Specifically, it is now possible to view an image by tapping on its icon in the map view. Alternatively, the user can also bring up a gallery view of all the photos he/she has taken during the trip by clicking on the “gallery” button on the trip home page.
Before I finished all of that up, I decided it was time to figure out how my app was going to continue to track GPS coordinates when it gets hidden (another app gains focus). Previous to this research, Excursional consisted of a single Activity – Android’s paradigm for an app with a UI. However, when an Activity loses focus it is paused by the system – thereby making it impossible to receive GPS coordinate updates. So I started looking at the Service, and decided it’s right for Excursional.
Services in Android are headless apps that run in the background until explicity told to stop. Sounds pretty well-suited to listening for GPS updates to me. So now Excursional consists of an Activity and a Service, and will keep tracking routes even when the UI isn’t visible.
In my next post I’ll be posting some screenshots of the updated UI. Thanks for reading!
-Allan
Pictures and Persistence
It looks like I’m finally getting close to an app with a decent set of functionality now. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on being able to save and reload an Excursional trip, as well as adding geotagged pictures into the mix.
For persisting trip data, I chose to store it all in fairly simple XML files. This is what lead me to my first major disappointment with Android; the lack of the javax.xml.transform package in the Android SDK. One of the most common ways to write an XML file in Java is to create an org.w3c.dom.Document object, then write it out as a String with the help of the transform package. Without it, I was forced to create my own simple xml “toString”.
Although having to write this myself wasn’t all that much of a hardship, I was quite surprised that Google decided to leave functionality for a fairly common task out of the SDK.
With persistence taken care of, adding pictures to Excursional trips was next up on the to-do list. After a bit of tinkering with Android’s camera Intent, I was able to allow the user to take a picture with Android’s native camera app and have that picture linked in to their Excursional trip. Here’s a teaser:
Now I need to add the pictures to the trip’s xml file, and get some sort of photo gallery up. Overall, things are looking really good now – only a few more bits of functionality to add before Excursional is ready to go!
– Allan
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