Recently, I was asked for my opinion of what the best available Android devices currently offered on Verizon were. Verizon offers somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-16 different Android devices (last I checked), and finding a good one can be somewhat of a struggle if you don’t know specifically what you’re looking for, what Android is capable of, or what you want out of Android and your new smartphone.
So, after a rather long absence from Android, I decided to dive back in and start tweaking an app I started a while back. This particular app uses the GPS to store a location in a database. The problem was, the app would sometimes try and store the location before the GPS was even ready, resulting in coordinates of 0, 0. At the same time, I also wanted the GPS reading to be as accurate as possible before it was stored in the database. Accuracy of +/- 80 feet is not so useful in the long run.
After some thought on how best to accomplish this without pissing off the user (nobody likes an application that seems to hang, even if there is something ticking in the background), I settled on displaying a ProgressDialog to let the user that something is indeed happening, and they can continue once its done.
I just finished writing an overhaul for my own personal Android application repository, which I call AndroidLab. Previously, it was merely a point for me to upload an APK and for others to then download said APK. Not overly useful, aside from serving as a file server.
Ive upgraded the system to make it easier to track the development process of my applications. You can now download all previous versions of the application that have been uploaded, as well as a detailed changelog that gets updated each time a new version is uploaded to the server.
Hopefully this will make the application more useful, and Ive got more changes planned for some distant point in the future, including a feedback and rating system, as well as error logs and reporting.
You can check out the site at android.advback.com
