Mobile Development

At Christmas I released my Droid 2 CAD app on Android Marketplace, this has now had nearly 5000 downloads and clocked up some 16,000 user sessions. The app is not a game but a GPS point recording tool. But for someone who only dabbles in software development the opportunities the current mobile app trend offers are amazing, 5000 downloads may not be much compared to apps like angry birds but I had an idea, I coded and published it and other people actually wanted to download and try it. I released my app for free with no adverts, next time I may looking into this more but when I released it I didn't think anyone would be interested it and I would be adding to the bloat in the marketplace.


One highlight this year so far has has been having to use Google translate to be able to read the feedback for the app because people i can not even speak to liked my app enough to leave positive feedback. That is something that I thought would never happen.

I am now not sure what to try next with the release of Android Honeycomb means a whole new array of devices is just waiting to be developed on.

And it is not just limited to mobile phone development, technologies like Microsoft's XNA studio and Xbox Live Indie Games are allowing homegrown game writers to create, publish and get paid for their own games both on the XBox 360 and Windows phone 7 (Check out Team Mango at www.team-mango.com ).

If you have an idea and are interested these are good times.

(This started out as a comment on the Guardian Tech Blog )

Map screen taken from collected anonymous data using www.flurry.com

Progress on the VR player

Still progressing the radio player app, now revised the playing media info and added a read only twitter feed.
Thinking of looking into tabs but not sure how that will work on small sized screens.

RF Tools VSWR+ / GPS2CAD

A few weeks ago I released my first Application onto the Android Marketplace. I thought that i would get a few downloads but not many, the application I published is a very basic calculator useful only to RF aerials engineers. But at time of writing I have had 98 downloads with around 50% of those still installed and active.
This does make me want to carry on writing apps and releasing them. I have a few tweaks to make then i plan to release my GPS2CAD app and see if anyone can make use of it. it is based on the google notepad tutorial code but allows you to take points and then then export them as a dxf file for use with CAD software. I have posted about it before, i when i wrote it i was excited about using the GPS to create CAD data but over estimated the accuracy of the GPS in the phone, so i will release it and see if i get any feedback if i do, i may carry on working on it.