Archive for category My Freeware

Android Market Fragmentation

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Android Market, Linux, My Freeware, phones on April 22nd, 2009

pocketgamerbizPocketGamer.biz has an article on ‘What’s wrong with Android Market’. There are lots of criticisms of the Market many of which I have also expressed here and on MobilePhoneDevelopment.com. However, there’s one new piece of information at the end that I found interesting…

“At least one major carrier is specifying their Android devices to come without the Android store”

This ties in with my previous thoughts that some Android phones might not come with a full set of Google applications.

Presumably a carrier not using the Android Market would implement their own application store. From the carrier standpoint, I can see the sense of this in terms of controlling what’s on their store, app certification, the commission structure, payment mechanisms and ultimately perhaps what the users can install on their Android phone. However, I can see consumer confusion as to why they can’t get particular applications on their phone. There’s also likely to be general developer disillusionment that they can’t easy publish their application to all Android users.

Deep Inside Android

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Events, Getting Started, Linux, My Freeware on March 26th, 2009

I came across some useful slides recently. They are entitled ‘Deep Inside Android‘ from a presentation by Esmertec, an OHA member, at the OpenExpo 2008.

esmertecandroid
The presentation is useful for people who want to learn a bit more about Android Linux internals. The later slides also cover Android programming essentials.

UKTraffic

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, My Freeware on March 18th, 2009

My third freeware Android application is UKTraffic that was written at the end of 2008.

androiduktraffic

It gives latest UK England traffic conditions as published by the Highways Agency, Traffic Scotland and Traffic Wales.

UK Traffic is available free on the Android Market.

ASpell

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, My Freeware on March 18th, 2009

After writing WordNet, I received many emails asking for a spell checker. Most people wanted a spell checker to check SMS and emails. However, this wasn’t possible. Instead, I just created a stand-alone spell checker.

androidaspell

ASpell checks word spelling against GNU ASpell dictionary and says whether correct and suggests correct spellings. Defaults to American English unless you select British English check box.

ASpell is available free on the Android Market and at the time of of writing this has had over 28000 downloads.

WordNet

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, My Freeware on March 17th, 2009

WordNet was my first Android application written last year. It’s an English dictionary that uses WordNet.

wordnet

Features include:

  • A UI that remains responsive during lookups (so you can back up or change your mind and look up something else)
  • The server URL and data parsing is data driven to allow these to be changed in the future without the user having to reinstall the application. (A similar application on the Android market is already ‘broken’ in that the servers they rely on have already changed)

WordNet is available free on the Android Market.