Second app on Playstore
Launched another app on playstore, learnings from apps this time are resizing background image and making app more responsive.
The app contains collection of 50 quotes from Bob Dylan.
My living tribute to the legend : Dire Straits
Dire straits is the artist who has knows the art of how to play with listeners mind or subconscious.
Imagine a song which contains element of birth, how society grows, death, impermanence of everything. All this can be felt in one song – Telegraph Road
This is my living tribute to legend – Dire Straits
Small App ideas
Listing out small app ideas which can be done in short span of time : 1-3 days
1. How much water you drink today
2. Add a signature to photo
3. An app which displays quotation
4. Tap fast – Add a button on screen and tap it again and see how many times you can tap it in one minute -
5. Birthday reminder
6. Daily spend tracker – this might take a week to accomplish
7. An app to demonstrate all the controls in Android – Button, ProgressBar, Layout
8. Packing list – Ability to add multiple suitcases for different trip types.
9. Where is my stuff – capture an object by photo and tag it to find out where you have stored it.
10. Business card manager – An app to capture photo of business cards and later organize it.
11. Home repair manager – An app to record which item was repaired at what time and what was the amount paid for repair . Problem : We forget to remember what was the last time an item was repaired.
12. Some important dates – Store all important dates like date of joining.
Shipping a simple app on Google Playstore
While driving on the way to office a thought came in my mind. How much minimum time it will take to develop an app and publish on Playstore? The immediate answer was one day!
I had an experience writing an android app before but I missed out on the publishing part, that was something I wanted to conquer. Also publishing an app on your own gives you a confidence, and you can proudly show off to your friends that you have an app by your name. Cool?
One of the blocks in app development is storing data, local is easy but no one likes static content. I thought of creating a simple app which will display quotes about software and programming. Considering it will be my first self published app, I believed in creating a simple without too many features. A simple app which will read data from json file hosted on dropbox share . The advantage of having it on dropbox is that I can update the json and add more quotes as and when required.
Also want to admit that I failed to develop in one day, it took me two days.
This is how my two days went:
1. First day went on building methods that will retrieve data, writing json and collecting data for app.
2. Developing UI and publishing to app store.
The app is not feature rich but does what it intends to, I have also added an option to share the quote. A long press on text will show the context menu.
You can download the app from:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softwaregeekquotes
Here are the screenshots of app:
I know this is not the best app out there on appstore, but these things were worth learning in a two day journey:
1. Stealing background – I am sure you are liking the background of the app. There are so many websites which offer background textures for free. Download background and use them in your app.
2. Fonts : The font you see is not android font, I have downloaded royalty free fonts from dafont.com
3. Dropbox – This the coolest part, I download JSON from Dropbox and read json and parse it using GSON library.
Here is my JSON snippet:
“Quotes”: {
“Quote”: [
{
“id”: “0″,
“text”: “The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it’s going to run. And if it doesn’t, it’ll be easy to make it fast.”,
“author”: “Joshua Bloch”,
“Image”: “unknown”
},
}
Also one fact worth mentioning is that I am not using dropbox API. I am using HttpUrlConnectionclass to download the json file.
4. Swipe Gestures– The app works by left and right swipe gesture, I am using a viewpager and loading a fragment at run time to show the content. Since ViewPager has everything in built to support swipe so its easy to implement left and right gestures in it.
5. Publish to Playstore – Most of devs have a fear in mind that even after developing, will my app will be accepted in playstore? But that’s more of a mental block, Apple has very strict regulations on quality of app, but google doesn’t have that. Once you have tested your app, publish it. Its really very fast.
Feel free to ask question, although I am a beginner but will try to answer.
P.S. – I will share the source code soon
UPDATE : 20_march-2013 – I have pushed the source code on GitHub, here is the repository : https://github.com/sumit4palz/SoftwareGeekQuotes
Don’t search for peace
One of the realization in my life is that more i searched for peace, it was creating more problem. The problem with getting into our so called peace full situation is that we are creating attachment to it.
One example that i have learned from my own life is getting into habit of listening to peaceful and calm full music for relaxation. Our mind starts loving this experience saying this is good. Problem occurs when you are not able to relax your mind even after listening to the music.
Why this problem?
When we start liking something the after affect of it is attachment. This is how our mind works, when we identify something as good we get attached to it. When we see something bad happening it creates aversion.
On listening to relaxation music my mind agreed that its a good experience and got attached to it. One day I was stressed and i was unable to calm down my mind despite listening to relaxation music. I ended up being more frustrated 
. The reason for frustration is, our mind was attached to the idea that I will be relaxed by listening to the music. When I didn’t get that satisfaction I was expecting it made me felt frustrated.
I believe we should try to peaceful and calmful every time and should not depend on any thing external. What if we depend on something external and that thing disappears from our life?
We are not pinnacle of Humanity
I always thought that we human beings are pinnacle of Humanity but I feel this thinking is not correct. There has been a civilizations prior to Sumerians that were far more advanced than we human beings.
So who was it ?
Atlanteans : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis
Edgar Cayce was an extra ordinary human being, he made 14000 prediction out of which 12000 are already true. He was the one who predicted earth will be shifting poles in future. Edgar Cayce also talked about lost civilization of Atlantis (after Plato).
One of the most remarkable predictions from Edgar Cayce was about Hall of Records located underneath Sphinx. These records are last writings from Atlanteans. There is lot of information available on web and books written from Edgar Cayce for his predictions. Check this out : http://listverse.com/2012/01/06/top-10-predictions-from-edgar-cayce/
The level of technology reached when Atlantis was at its peak was far superior to our own. The people from Atlantis are the one who created Sphinx and pyramid of Egypt. The Atlanteans were spiritually evolved human being, they had access to more than three dimensions.
The reason why Scientific/Archaeologist community doesn’t believe that Sphinx is built around 10000 B.C is because it will defy Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is the reason why information about existence of Atlantis will be always opposed by Scientific community.
I would suggest you to watch this award winning documentary from NBC about Sphinx. It will change your thought about life and human existence.
If this video is not enough to satisfy your desire to know about life than my suggestion will be to read this book.
Flower of Life : http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Secret-Flower-Life-Vol/dp/1891824171/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354515213&sr=8-1&keywords=flower+of+life
