Monday, June 4, 2012

Android Phone Fans

Android Phone Fans

Evernote’s new app Hello tries to help you remember who you just met

Posted: 03 Jun 2012 11:01 AM PDT

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Do you have problems remembering the names of people you have just met? Then give a shot to Evernote’s new app, called Hello, which helps you organize you’re new acquaintances, for whom you can store contact information, a photo and also pull information from their LinkedIn profile.

Unfortunately for them, the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother ended a few weeks ago. Having Barney Stinson, the character portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris, use the app to store the names and photos of his female conquests instead of the big diary would have been perfect product placement. Or not.

The amount of steps required to fill the information currently makes the app feel like a naive idea. Despite belonging to the target market (I’m  so bad at remembering names that I don’t know a few from my own class for the past 4 years) I simply cannot imagine myself using the current system. Stuff like NFC and even QR-codes are a necessity to make it close to being practical.

You can now Any.do on Chrome

Posted: 03 Jun 2012 10:18 AM PDT

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Although I’m not much of a to-do list maker, when I do use one, I use Any.do. The design won me over, and so did the fact that it was Android first. After accumulating a ton of downloads on our beloved OS, it’s now making its way to other platforms: Chrome and iOS.

You can get the extension here. Unfortunately, I’ve found it to be buggy right now. Tasks and folders weren’t being displayed after I had added them, and after logging out and back in, it shows me a blank overlay. The design is beautiful, as with the mobile app, and they’ve added a useful pop-out option, but unless I’m the only one facing these issues, it isn’t quite consumption ready.

[via TechCrunch]

10 Burning Questions with Alec Shobin of Subatomic Studios

Posted: 03 Jun 2012 08:45 AM PDT

We’ve caught up with Alec Shobin, a figurehead at Subatomic Studios who make the highly-acclaimed and successful defender series Fieldrunners! On the verge of bringing out a sequel, Alec takes time to chat with us about many things related to Android, including their monetization strategy (theirs makes a TON of sense), the challenges of developing Fieldrunners for a fragmented platform like Android. It’s a great read so kick your feet up and dig in. PS: stay along past the break for a donut anthem. Yup, a donut anthem. Pure awesomeness.

Phandroid: How did you get started with Android Development?

Alec:When we launched Fieldrunners HD for Android in 2011, Fieldrunners had already been out for around 3 years on other platforms.  We’d brought the game to mobile platforms like the Nintendo DSi, PlayStation Minis, and even a few “dumb-phones,” so it made a lot of sense for us to bring the game to Android as well.

Phandroid: What phone do you personally use?

Alec: Our team personally uses a good mix of phones, ranging from the Samsung Galaxy S2 to, of course, a variety of iPhones.

Phandroid: What was your biggest challenge in developing Fieldrunners HD?

Alec: Android is unique compared to other mobile platforms because of the massive variety of different devices Android apps need to support. Learning the ins and outs of all these devices necessitated an adapted approach to development, but in the end, our superstar engineering and QA teams did a fantastic job!

4. Are you going to keep the Fieldrunners series going? As you may have heard, we just announced Fieldrunners 2!  You can learn more about the game by going to Fieldrunners2.com.  We’re previewing the game to folks at E3, so keep your eyes on the web for more info and other updates!

Phandroid: Monetization: in terms of driving revenue, can you tell us about your experience, your strategy, and the overall potential?

Alec: Our monetization strategy was pretty simple – make an awesome game!

Phandroid: What do you want to see in future versions of Android?

Alec: Simultaneous time travel and microwave oven features!  Seriously though, as a platform, Android really has so much potential.  More than anything, we want to be surprised by totally new features we’ve never even considered but subconsciously always wanted.

Phandroid: Do you develop for other platforms and how does Android compare to those platforms?

Alec: As we said above, we develop for a variety of mobile platforms, and the biggest difference was the huge volume of different devices Android apps need to support.

Phandroid: If you could give one tip to fellow Android Developers, what would it be?

Alec: Make sure you’ve got a good selection of different Android devices standing by when you go to QA your apps.

Phandroid: Tell us one thing that most people don’t know about you or Subatomic as a whole.

Alec: Little known fact: We developed a game with Autodesk called “Tinkerbox.”  Definitely check it out if you’re in to physics based puzzle games!

Phandroid: Beignets or donuts?

Alec: Everybody loves donuts!

If you want to see what’s so great about Fieldrunners, check it out in the Google Play Store! It’s only $1.99 and I guarantee you that the game earns every cent of it. Stay tuned for news from E3 regarding the second installment of Fieldrunners, and be sure to follow the Fieldrunners Twitter account or like their Facebook page for all sorts of updates.

Finally, visit their site to check out more cool stuff, including a store where you can buy Fieldrunners merchandise. We want to give a big thank you to Alec for taking his time to participate in Phandroid’s Developer Appreciation Month!

Want to get involved in Developer Appreciation Month? Contact us and start your message with “Developer Appreciation Month”.

Don’t miss your chance to win! Sign up for our Developer Newsletter: it’s required to win most of our contests and it’ll feature some huge announcements that you won’t want to miss.

[Developer] What are the best UI resources out there?

Posted: 03 Jun 2012 07:52 AM PDT

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Ever since the launch of ICS, we’ve seen a greater deal of UI resources made for Android developers by various members of the community. I’ve decided to list a few that I know of, and would love to hear from you which are your favorites, and why.

 

ActionBarSherlock

Created by Jake Wharton, ActionBarSherlock brings the ActionBar capabilities back to all devices running on Android 2.x. The ActionBar is of vital importance to ICS phones and tablets, yet its lack of backward compatibility meant that it isn’t available natively to a huge majority of the devices in the market currently. Google needs to add this to the support library, and every developer needs to get some experience with it.

Link: http://actionbarsherlock.com/

 

Action Bar Style Generator

I’ve highlighted the importance of the ActionBar above, which needs to be themed to suit the look of an app. While the process itself isn’t that complicated, you can save yourself some time using Jeff Gilfelt’s neat little tool. It creates all the required resources, including drawables, the colors and the style files.

Link: http://jgilfelt.github.com/android-actionbarstylegenerator

 

Pull-to-Refresh

Not everyone is a fan of the pull-to-refresh concept, and I can understand why: the capability simply not that obvious to the common user. However, if you do wish to add the functionality, have a look at Chris Banes library. Additionally, note his blog post regarding adding an indicator to point out the feature to the user.

Link: http://www.senab.co.uk/category/android-2/pull-to-refresh-android-2/

 

Android Ribbon Menu and Android Delicious

These two are based on the new trend towards a side navigation menu (like what we’ve seen in the Facebook and the new Google+ app). I haven’t had a chance to test run either, simply spotted them on my Google+ feed, but they look interesting and are definitely the way to go as we shift from the dashboard UI system.

Links: https://github.com/lexs/android-delicious, https://github.com/darvds/RibbonMenu

 

Google+ profiles to follow

Android UI Patterns

Android Niceties
Posted by at 8:20 AM

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