Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
I recently used Phonegap to produce my iPhone app, Boxing Coach, which I’ve been very happy with. I love phonegap and being able to avoid Obj-C for 90% of production is SO nice. Yes, I hear you out there…”Obj-C is actually not that bad…given a week of diligent study you could…blahblahblah” But I’d rather do my simple app logic in javascript and HTML5, especially if that means porting to Android with only a day or two of extra production. That’s the theory anyway.
The iPhone version of Boxing Coach, using the nice new plugins architecture of phonegap, went very well. I used iScroll to handle some scrolling mayhem, which was great. Although there’s still some issues with the onscreen keyboard messing up layout from time to time. I used the uicontrols to hook into the native iPhone tab bar functionality along the bottom, which with a couple tweaks worked well too. Local database storage worked great, audio played nicely, all in all a happy experience.
Anyway, on to Android. I’m going to condense notes here and maybe expand on them later via comments if folks are interested.
First I had some trouble setting up the Android project using the droidgap command via terminal. I’m on OS X, fyi. I checked my java, ant, android sdk all installed correctly. Had the system path stuff set up as well. Ended up being simple syntax stuff. Here’s what worked:
ruby ./droidgap “/users/max/documents/android” “MYAPPNAME” com.maxmediacorp.MYAPPNAME “/users/projects/phonegap/myapp/www” “/users/max/documents/MYAPPBUILD”
Ah, so now after following the other basic Android Getting Started instrux, I had a project in Eclipse to start tinkering with. Firs thing I had to do was replace the bottom uicontrols from iPhone build with basic html-based button images with onClick handlers. No problem, not sure why I just didn’t do that from the get go to make portability easier. Probably was just enticed by using “native” iPhone controls via phonegap 
.
The next thing I noticed when testing on the device was that it autorotated, when I wanted it to stay locked into portrait orientation. This was easily fixed by going into the manifest and adding an “android:orientation” param inside the activity node of the XML, ala
android:screenOrientation=”portrait” android:configChanges=”orientation|keyboardHidden”
Nice, now no more ugly autorotation to landscape breaking up my layout. Orientation-aware apps are overrated anyway, right? While on the topic, there was a bunch of extraneous stuff inside the manifest left over by droidgap that I removed, unneeded permissions, a camera activity? I nuked them and app still works so hopefully no harm done.
Next annoyance was anytime you used the trackball on my Nexus One, the whole app view would scroll up alarmingly off screen. Not good. Touch events were handled nicely, via the e.preventDefault I presume within the main js code. But trackball had its own rules apparently and wasn’t getting caught by phonegap. After a bit of searching through Android docs, finally stumbled on the following fix, which can be added to your main app class (the one that extends DroidGap)
@Override public boolean onTrackballEvent(MotionEvent event) {
return true;
}
No more trackball mayhem! I love simple solutions.
That’s it for now. Hope those bits are helpful to folks. I’ll post more as I come across them. My next problem is how to start/stop/restart a thread in Android to handle folks leaving my app, coming back while saving its state, etc. Who said multithreading is a good thing?
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
Thanks everyone who came to the Flash and the City (FATC) pre-conference workshop for mobile and devices! Hope you picked up a few new ideas about developing with Flash for mobile devices. For those who would like to check out the source files and slides I used, here are a couple links:
Hope to see everyone again next year at FATC, or sooner at another conference!
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
For those multitudes who missed my eSeminar on the Open Screen Project, you can see the recording now, courtesy of Alessandro Pace. Thanks Alessandro for organizing that! Hopefully the technical difficulties didn’t put off folks. My prez skills are a work in progress to be sure, but hope everyone learned a little something new about the OSP!
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Ok, it’s been about three weeks since my Species Explorer mobile application passed Ovi QA and popped onto the Ovi Store, and about two weeks since I added it to the GetJar storefront as well. So a good time to sit back and see how the downloads look and start a bit of simple analysis on how effective they are in getting your mobile application out there. Or I should really say my Species Explorer application, because a different application may have completely different downloads than what mine has.
Before I start into the numbers, a couple things about the application. Species Explorer Mobile is an application designed to work with my Species Explorer online site and let users browse and post wildlife sightings using their mobile device. For the current version, this means a Nokia 5th edition touchscreen phone like the 5800 or N97. The application is a free download.
For both stores, I did very little cross-promotion as I wanted to see simply how many downloads could be generated by the store itself just by existing in its catalog. So no credits injected to put it in any “featured” area, or Google ad buys, etc. GetJar does offer tools for publishers to pay to promote their apps, Ovi does not as far as I know, yet, but I’m sure will be coming in Ovi “2.0″.
For Ovi, the application was entered into the Social Networks area (It didn’t really fit neatly into other categories, and Species Explorer is essentially a social network for wildlife enthusiasts). For GetJar for reasons I have already forgotten (perhaps just to contrast with Ovi’s category) it ended up in the Travel->More Travel section.
Ovi Store
So enough preamble, let’s get to numbers. For Ovi Store, the first week’s download numbers were a pleasant surprise. They looked like this:
Day 1: 553
Day 2: 1425
Day 3: 1512
Day 4: 743
Day 5: 628
Day 6: 495
Day 7: 264
After that first week, the numbers dropped quickly to below 100 downloads per day, levelling off to be between 20-30 downloads per day on average. I assume the dropoff to be directly correlated to how quickly my app fell off the main “home” screen at the Ovi store. However, I may be wrong, as Ovi says that applications are sorted by a variety of factors, newness presumably being only one of them.
What struck me as much as the surprising (to me) number of initial downloads was the variety of countries downloading the application. To date, 137 countries have downloaded Species Explorer, with the top 10 being:
| #1 | United Kingdom | 533 |
| #2 | Italy | 448 |
| #3 | Germany | 313 |
| #4 | Turkey | 308 |
| #5 | Saudi Arabia | 303 |
| #6 | France | 294 |
| #7 | Spain | 281 |
| #8 | India | 249 |
| #9 | Indonesia | 195 |
| #10 | Russian Federation | 170 |
Considering my app is only in English, it was nice to see so many international downloads. And just reinforces to me that Ovi is definitely very powerful for giving your application a global reach.
All in all, I was more than happy with the results from getting Species Explorer onto the Ovi Store. Now I will be looking into ways in which to keep the application “fresh” and visible (the old “Top 25″ problem in the AppStore?) I expect Ovi will be pushing out ways for publishers to do that this year. For now, I presume getting good reviews for your app, and star ratings will help bump your app to the top of the list.
GetJar
I put up Species Explorer Mobile on GetJar a week after Ovi, so the stats are a bit sparser in more ways than one. For the two weeks it’s been there, the application has about 100 downloads. Although I am a bit suspicious of the stats as it seems it will say one number in a view, then show another when I click another view, ie going from month to month in the reports. So not sure if they have all their backend ducks in a row there.
In any case, no matter the view I pick, the total number of downloads comes to 100. A far cry from the whirlwind of activity I saw on Ovi. Which could be attributed to a variety of possible factors:
- no GetJar catalog preinstalled on handsets?
- app category less visible than the category chosen in Ovi Store?
- less of an international presence and/or smaller user base
- fewer supported handsets (5th edition touchscreen) in GetJar userbase
GetJar does offer various stats options for download/viewing, which again seemed inconsistent (eg show “no data” when there should be data). But they do tell some info, such as that a majority of users are to the 5800XM or N97 handsets. This jives with what the Ovi report showed as well, which was basically 60% 5800XM and 30% N97.
Moving forward, I’ll look into a few ways to try and boost more traffic to these storefront and/or position it more prominently. Also when the app becomes available to other platforms like Android, iPhone, etc I will compare experiences there as well.
The bottom line for now, Ovi seems to be a great opportunity to get significant downloads. GetJar is, at least for my app so far, less powerful. That said, GetJar is free and easy to get your app up onto its store, so no reason NOT to do it as well. So do both! Please share any comments and corrections to the above.
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
With the tongue-in-cheek title (which I realize most won’t take as tongue-in-cheek, and so just think I’m a weird guy) of “A Fundee Speaks”, I’ll be doing an eSeminar next Thursday, 12/17 at 12pm EST. Details of how to connect are available at Alessandro’s announcement page. I’ll try to cover some of the details of the application process, my specific experiences as a fundee, a brief overview of the components developed for OSP, and answer questions from seminar attendees who are considering applying to the OSP. I’m going to try and leave ample time for Q&A, so can try to answer specific questions from folks.
Hope to see you there (virtually, that is!) Oh, and did I mention that a software package will be given away worth up to $2100? There, I just did.
Max
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Before too many days go by and I get sucked back into my client projects, thought I’d inject my own fond memories of this past week’s Adobe MAX conference into the blogosphere. First of all, I have to admit upfront that I missed almost all the sessions while there, except for the keynotes, due to the fact that I was playing the role of “booth babe” at my Open Screen Project funded Species Explorer booth (see figure 1).
For those who aren’t familiar with the Open Screen Project (like the developer I met on one of the shuttle buses, who politely listened to me rattle on about OSP while thinking the whole time I was talking about the Adobe Open Source Media Framework) it’s a 10 million dollar fund set up by Nokia and Adobe to support companies looking to develop “multiscreen” (aka “contextual”) applications based on the Flash Platform. You can watch a session about it featuring David Blaine, where he cuts me in half and then puts me back together. Actually, he does a card trick. And I talk about Species Explorer. And Mark Doherty and Bill Perry describe the OSP fund.
Species Explorer and OSP Fund
My main reason for being at MAX, as I mentioned, was to talk about Species Explorer, and my experience with the OSP Fund to anyone and everyone who would listen. What is Species Explorer? In short, a web site for people to post wildlife sightings and share them with other users around the world. The OSP fund helped me develop a mobile app, a desktop browser app, and an app that runs in the Playstation 3 browser as well. All fun stuff (and here’s as good a place as any to say thanks to Scott Janousek and Hooken Mobile who led up the majority of the mobile app dev) As a small developer with an independent project that had no outside funding, the OSP Fund was a great opportunity to move development forward. Thanks to Manu, Mark and everyone else who thought Species Explorer was an interesting idea outside of the normal casual games and technology-focused apps, and gave it the big OSP stamp of approval. Now it’s up to me to move it forward and take it to the next level. For those wanting to watch the session (audio with PPT visuals) here it is:
Other MAX Developments
The big news out of MAX that is burning a bright flashy trail (pun intended) through blogs seems to be the Flash to iPhone announcement. To me, it’s a nice push in a good direction, but doesn’t mean much to me in any immediate way. CS5 is a bit away, there’s lots of hiccups with that solution that will take a while to work out before it’s ready for primetime, and in any case the kind of hooks I need into the device probably won’t be there for a much longer time. A more immediate solution may be services like Ansca.
Augmented reality was a big draw too at MAX, and one of the few sessions I was able to attend. Like most others, I walked out of the session thinking, “Cool! I can’t wait to download the FLARToolkit and start adding augmented reality to…everything!”. It was only when I arrived home and tried to explain how augmented reality could be added to my projects that my wife brought me back to reality with a few simple questions, like “uh, who exactly is going to use that feature?” and “Why do you need that?” Don’t get me wrong, augmented reality is SO going to happen in one of my projects, just not until I can figure out a practical need that makes it better than alternative UI’s that users don’t need a web cam and printed media to use. Still, too cool to ignore. But even that postal service example is probably not REALLY used by many people. I mean, there IS technology already that helps you figure out whether something will fit in a box…I like to call it a “tape measure.” Google it.
What I did find compelling was the Adobe Flash Platform Services, a set of new, uh, services from Adobe that lets you easily share your flash content across a grab bag of social networks, mobile networks, including ways to monetize your content through ads, and built-in analytics. And that’s just the “Distribution” leg of the services, there’s cool collaboration and social network hooks (coming) as well. While there are some sharing widgets/services out there that serve a similar need, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do it in such a robust way as Adobe is doing here, and especially one focused on integrating seamlessly with Flash.
Flash Mobile Community
Inspired by Dale’s thoughtful blog post on the sort of “where are we now?” (the “we” being those Flash Lite developers who have soldiered on year to year since the glory days of Flash Lite 1.1) I thought I’d try and add my own point of view as well.
This is a bit tricky, without sounding like a bitter old man complaining “why you young cuss, I remember when we didn’t even HAVE functions!” to these upstart developers with Flash 10.1 on their brain coming into mobile. But damn it, I DO remember when we didn’t even have functions. What we did have was a commitment to Flash, and a big interest in mobile, and an understanding that big things were coming for mobile and we wanted to be part of it. As a US developer, it never really came, mainly because not enough people had the phones with Flash on them, and if they did (hello Verizon and BREW?) there was no easy path to get your content on the carrier/phone. So most of us (not all, but most) of us Flash Lite devotees made some cool stuff that nobody ever saw, let alone bought.
MAX 2009 and FP10.1 may be a tipping point, where this all starts to change, time will tell. But as I have concluded each year in the Flash mobile space, progress IS being made. Hasn’t been as fast as I’d have liked, and there’s been significant deadends and missteps, but it HAS progressed. And if any time is worth looking at Flash and mobile, it’s now. With Google predicting huge market share for Android, Palm Pre entering the game, there’s reason to get excited. And of course there’s already big opportunities for folks targeting Nokia-friendly markets.
Like Dale I’m curious of how the “old guard” will interface with the “new guard” coming into mobile Flash now. I’m guessing we old guard won’t be obsolete any time soon. We’re a wily bunch, and I’m sure will adapt with the times. But that’s the young optimist in me now, not the bitter old man.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
There’s a new article up on Adobe’s DevNet area which I contributed to, “Advancing mobile storytelling with Adobe’s distributable player,” describing some of my experiences developing the Adobe MAX conference mobile guide for Adobe and Untravel Media last fall. For those looking for an in-depth tutorial with code and walkthrough, please don’t hate me – this article stays up on the surface more and takes a more “narrative” approach.
Michael Epstein contributed several sections focused on Untravel‘s work in mobile storytelling as well, with some thoughts on how the latest version of Flash Lite provides new ways to achieve their goals and “develop a global channel of location-specific travel stories.”
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Saw this Best and Worst Of The Mobile Web e-book recently, which I found a very good collection of advice that applies not only to mobile web sites, but really any mobile-based content including Flash Lite. Download the pdf, some good examples and advice in there.
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Thanks to Rob Toole for mc’ing and posting the latest BAMaDUG (Boston Adobe Mobile and Device User Group) podcast. We covered a lot of topics from the Adobe MAX conference, the new Flash Lite OTA Player, CS4, and more. And I ALMOST got to try Scott’s homebrew belgian beer, but one of Cambridge One’s fine waitstaff shut us down before I could grab some. Oh well, next time.
If interested and local to Boston, please do come and attend our next get together. Or join our google group or newly created Adobe group.
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
I’ll be presenting a bit about my independent project, Species Explorer, at the Boston Flex Application Incubator Group meeting this coming Monday eve from 7-9pm EST. In case anyone is interested, check out the announcement, it will be an online meeting so surf on over! While this meeting will focus on the Flex component of the project, I may talk about the mobile side as well if there’s interest. And although not currently Flash Lite, there may be a Flash Lite version upcoming…or iPhone…or Android…or Python/KuneriLite/FL
Hope to see you there!
Max
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