Beginning Android

Sheeps

Last year I completed an honors degree in computer science and I've recently realised my mistake having taken a year out of searching for a career due to injury, jury service and a couple of other minor reasons. I've really only got around to starting to look for jobs properly for the first time since I graduated in the last couple of months. In the time I've been interviewing a common enough question seems to be what I've been doing for the last year since I graduated which is a question I have always struggled with. The truth is that I have no commercial software development experience since I've left college, which seems inexcusable to the interviewer, which is fair enough. This means that what ever answer I give to this question is irrelevant because my work experience is not software related.

To rectify this problem I started getting back in to the groove of programming on a regular basis. I started back with J2SE which was never a strong suite in college, however since most of the jobs I had been contacted about were Java development jobs, I decided this would be a good idea. As a result Java is now my strongest language. After refamiliarising myself with Java I decided I would get in to developing for Android. I had taken a module in J2ME in college and not only did I like it, but I had been good at it. I had always liked Java in college, but never bothered to really get in to it because of the course modules I had taken which were mostly C++. I think Android was definitely a good choice because I had appreciated mobile development before and because some of the skills I had picked up programming J2ME were transferable to Android. Also Symbian is practically dead now.

I published my first android app on the market place a couple of days ago but I had not intended on releasing this because it is the first app I've developed as a means of becoming familiar with the android sdk. I decided that I should publish my first app as a free app for the sake of not only having an app on the android market under my belt but to experience and learn how to publish apps in a commercial forum.

I think the first thing I learned is that it is a good thing to maybe not be so impatient with development progress. I was fairly eager to get something straight on to the market place and as a result the first review was one star and a comment saying that my app wasn't worth downloading, however I've since updated the app with more functionality and I do intend to increase the functionality and content of my app over time as I learn the android SDK.

The app I first decided to do was a tool for checking the lotto. I decided to set up a personal development blog for recording all of my efforts with developing apps and using other technology. So far first app is a free app that pulls all of the latest results for each type of lotto game from the lotto website. With in the next week I plan to have updates to allow a user to enter in lines of their lotto ticket so that they can check how many matches they have and how much they've won and then I would like to allow a user to check where the nearest retailer is so that if they've won they can cash their ticket in.

I've got a couple of other ideas for apps that I hope to publish in the next couple of weeks, so I'm going maybe update this thread with my progress and hopefully it will contain some useful information for people who are in a similar situation to me and wish to engage with the android sdk.

Mezcita

Sheeps wrote: »

So far first app is a free app that pulls all of the latest results for each type of lotto game from the lotto website. With in the next week I plan to have updates to allow a user to enter in lines of their lotto ticket so that they can check how many matches they have and how much they've won and then I would like to allow a user to check where the nearest retailer is so that if they've won they can cash their ticket in.

No offence but as is it's not offering anything different from me physically looking at the lotto.ie website. However, if you could offer something where people could physically punch in their numbers and the app could check on all historical results, that could be useful. Regarding the nearest retailer idea, I wouldn't bother. People know where their local newsagents are as they probably bought the ticket from that shop in the first place.

Good luck with it.

Sheeps

Mezcita wrote: »

No offence but as is it's not offering anything different from me physically looking at the lotto.ie website. However, if you could offer something where people could physically punch in their numbers and the app could check on all historical results, that could be useful. Regarding the nearest retailer idea, I wouldn't bother. People know where their local newsagents are as they probably bought the ticket from that shop in the first place.

Good luck with it.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess the main reason that I thought this app would be a good idea was because it had (or will have) the functionality of the website but is presented to the user in a faster more efficient way. I suppose a comparison might be that on a mobile device people generally prefer to use the facebook app over the mobile version of the website in a mobile browser because more time is spent navigating the website in the browser.

The point about the map application is a very good point and although im using the development of this app as a way of learning developing for Android, at the same time I am now delivering a product to users and I dont want to overload it with shite, so maybe I'll leave it out or replace it with something else. I really do appreciate the feedback though, thanks.

tallus

Lotto app is very handy, and it's a lot faster than having to open the browser.

Thanks Sheeps, very handy app.

Ste-

Will find your app handy as I hate going to lotto.ie and find it cumbersome to navigate through opera mini.

I know it may not be technically posible but to have ticket scanning ala teh lotto machines would be uber cool! DOn't tihnk it's possbile without know how the barcodes work.


Thanks again for the app.

Atomic Pineapple

Ste- wrote: »

I know it may not be technically posible but to have ticket scanning ala teh lotto machines would be uber cool! DOn't tihnk it's possbile without know how the barcodes work.

Not possible, the barcode only returns a pointer to a secure database that is not accessible so only the Lotto themselves can make an App that can do scanning.

@Sheeps, good idea on doing a personal project and documenting it, I done my final year project on Android in the early days of Android and made a website documenting it. As I searched for jobs Android became more popular and I started getting contacted via my website documenting my Android work and got a job that way.

I now have 2 years Android commercial experience and almost a years Objective C and iOS experience and it has opened up a lot more possibilities when it comes to jobs.

On the app itself the Lotto thing is pretty much done to death so my advise would be to get it cleaned up, offer some nice functionality, make it look professional and then move on to another app to showcase you can do different things with Android, do location aware and accelerometer apps for example.

Also can I ask where your parsing the data from?

Lastly if you want some help or need some advise feel free to contact me via PM.

Sheeps

draffodx wrote: »

Not possible, the barcode only returns a pointer to a secure database that is not accessible so only the Lotto themselves can make an App that can do scanning.

@Sheeps, good idea on doing a personal project and documenting it, I done my final year project on Android in the early days of Android and made a website documenting it. As I searched for jobs Android became more popular and I started getting contacted via my website documenting my Android work and got a job that way.

I now have 2 years Android commercial experience and almost a years Objective C and iOS experience and it has opened up a lot more possibilities when it comes to jobs.

On the app itself the Lotto thing is pretty much done to death so my advise would be to get it cleaned up, offer some nice functionality, make it look professional and then move on to another app to showcase you can do different things with Android, do location aware and accelerometer apps for example.

Also can I ask where your parsing the data from?

Lastly if you want some help or need some advise feel free to contact me via PM.

I've actually started reading a good book which is about developing android apps around strong GUI design, so working on the visuals is probably the next skill I'm going to work on strengthening I think. I'm parsing the data from the accessible results page on the main lotto website. http://www.lottery.ie/Accessible-Results/

My future plans for the app include some kind of table for displaying how many people won what, a ticket checker and then in the next couple of weeks I'm going to look at maybe using the camera as an input device for the ticket checker since I've done a bit of image processing before and liked it. I've never done image processing on a mobile platform however, so again it's just something I've currently planned to look in to. I think that may set it apart from other similar apps out there at the minute.