Android
Spent the last few weekends doing some Android applications for my HTC Desire. I thought my first app would be something to help me learn Finnish. It’s called FinnGo (Finnish Lingo). I am also using it to help me learn Android.
For learning languages, I find that translating headlines is usually pretty good… they are a few lines which you can usually guess. I usually read these on my mobile phone when I am in bed or sitting in the armchair – either way, the wife gets quite annoyed when I ask her to help me translate some of the phrases. Hence the application. Google translate is excellent – although it struggles with Finnish – but it’s always a nightmare trying to set up the URLs.
For the application itself, I have made many learnings..
- sdk. Use eclipse… and then it’s a doddle… you don’t even need a device as they have emulators running within eclipse.
- market. 25USD to have the honour to upload… you soon start to work out that google is not just making money out of ads 🙂
- admob. Bought by google, but still seems to be the main ad engine… although for a select few they are starting to serve adsense ads.
- adsense on mobile. You thought getting adsense account for web was hard… try mobile – lucky for us, if you already have adsense due to a blog or website, then getting a mobile account is quite easy as you can reuse your existing one!
- web views. really hard… I will add the link here that helped me…
- progress bar. exceptionally hard. trick is to use webchromeclient attached to your webview and the onprogress method. Best to use the inbuilt progress spinner on the title bar. problem is that UI updates are not always done on events like clicking buttons (to load web pages for example) – hence the need for webchromeclient.
- UI design. eclipse toolset is good for java programming, but still struggles with UI design (not quite as easy as VisualStudio for example).
- packaging. use google’s own pages for this… estimate about half a day to get your head around this and…
- icons. wow I did not realize these would be so complex.
- upload. Once you upload you probably want to install the market version… make sure you uninstall your own test version first… they do not work in parallel (and the error is not very reassuring… might make you want to unpublish if you read it)…
I installed this app last night and it is pretty neat. There are a few bugs though. The ilta page seems to get stuck in an infinite translate loop. This is unfortunate as I like that news site the best.
Also a suggestion I have would be to either make the buttons links or put them under a menu or something. I’m assuming that you have already added your space for the ad at the top and a lot of realistate has been lost. Making the buttons smaller could help with that.
I look forward to your updates. Thanks”
Thanks for your comments!
Can you tell me what device and Android OS you are using? I’ve not yet hit an infinite loop (I am on HTC Desire with 2.2). However I will try out Iltalehti again.
I’ll have a think around the buttons… I want to make them more generic later anyway (so users can define their own links and languages), but not had time yet recently.
Yes, the space is for the ads coming in from admobs. What I really want to do is to try and force admobs to think it is in the location where the language is, because I think it would be great to see an ad for say Sampo in Finnish and then go to the site & learn about Finnish banks… but a) admobs support is not very helpful and b) it does not always show up ads.
So the other thing I want to try to do, is work out if I can display my own ads in that space… for example there is a really cool app out there called suomen sanomalehdet by Baris Efe: http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/news_and_magazines/suomen-sanomalehdet_mtny.html
Hello again. I am using a Sansung Galaxy Vibrant. I haven’t seen the infinite loop in a while. You had a few updates right in a row there so maybe you got it. 🙂
I have noticed with your last update there have been some layering issues with the google text bubble showing up under the text divs. It becomes more noticeable when you scroll.
It would be nice if there was a way to leave feebdack right in the app without having to come to your blog.
Keep up the great work. Still love the app and use it almost daily. 🙂
Great to hear it’s being so useful.
I will try to add some kind of feedback into the app… I need to check out how other people do that.
I’ve noticed the layering problem too, although right now I am not sure how to fix that one…