For last couple of weeks I’ve been spending some time developing a small Android app for measuring disc golf drives during practice. At this point the software I would say that the software is in early beta and it has been tested only a bit in emulator and a bit with HTC Desire.
This is quite simple app as you can see from the source(@Bitbucket). This is my first Android app so there have been a few hurdles cross. I fought long and hard with the layout, but I had to abandon my initial plans to wait for a time when I really dive into the documentation.
I actually made myself an Android Market account so after some testing the app is likely to find its way there. I’ve been toying with the idea of making the current version with some small modifications(like support for more units of measure) available with ads and then developing a further premium version with no ads and some more improvements. Obvious improvements would include saving the drives for future perusal, adding disc information to drives etc. The benefit with this approach would be getting experience in publishing apps and trying out the various ad systems.
The source at Bitbucket is licensed GPLv2. This basic version will be available from there. The code isn’t as pretty as it could be so refactoring and writing unit tests is one task on the list. Unit testing on Android is not very difficult, but it is a lot of work. Best way I’ve found so far is to use RoboElectric.
Hopefully this app will be the start of a diverse portfolio to showcase my software developing skills. Bit of Captain Obvious at the end: developing this little app has once again shown me that building something you actually have need of is motivating. I have a whole bunch of these little repositories of projects that never really went beyond the idea and first couple of lines of code, because the motivation to continue just wasn’t there.