I just recently had an idea.
When I want to send text message with my galaxy device it is asking me if I want to send it with the built in messaging application, whatsapp, viber etc'. Of course you can configure a default way to send but this applies to all your friends. And what if someone don't have whatsapp but have skype/viber?
It happened after I had to meet my friend, I text him using whatsapp, but he didn't replied. I was busy and forgot about it, and got an answer 2 days later that whatsapp is not showing notification about new messages arrives and he prefer the usual text messages.
Of course the meeting didn't occur, but it left me with this idea. I don't want my phone to ask me how I want to send message to someone, I want it to know that and save me the thinking and mistaking. how can it be known? of course it is the preference of my friend. My first and most important when writing a message is that it will get to its destination.
That's how Prefx was born. Everybody will install that app and tell how they prefer to be contacted. When you want to send a message to someone, you will be redirected automatically to his/her preferred messaging system, assuring the message will arrive to its destination. This can be also applied to phone calls easily (although if someone is not answering you know it immediately), and also I have some other ideas on how to extend it.
My experience with writing android app
One of my ideas was to get the experience of writing an android application. Up until now it was a good experience and I would like to share that. Why in English? my previous posts were in hebrew, which is my tongue language? The answer will come in the post later.
So I started to write my first android application. I had a bit of experience before, but I never wrote a full app and never deployed anything to the android market.
It is quite nice and easy. Writing java with eclipse is my day 2 day work, so It was like swimming in a water I know. There are a lot of examples out there, Google's developer sites is very good and has a lot of documentation. The documentation is clear and there is also a big community to assist, in stackoverflow for example.
I started by writing a prototype, to make sure I sort of know how to do it. Here are some of the things I learned: How to start an activity that is not of your app, How to "normalize" a phone number to include country prefix, How to write to the android filesystem and how to save data in my app. I even created an icon using gimp!
Technologies I used
I saved my work at dropbox. I work alone, but on several different computers so it was pretty convenient. It also includes revision history, but I never used it because that requires to login to the website. So a friend advised me to use git. I know svn well, but when I got the principle of git that I don't need all the fuss of a remote server repository, it was pretty incredible. I just got revision history in eclipse for almost free.
After registering to the android market and deploying initial version, I started got exceptions from my few friends who install the application. Crashing the app was not nice, so I started using ACRA. This is an error reporting system. It behaves nice to the user - tell him/her an error occurred and suggest to send a message to developer, and when an error is reported, I get it to a google docs spread sheet include some data that is collected, and receives mail notification about new error. And this is a 5 minute install time monitoring tool.
Of course I have to test my application. Parts of the code I wrote by TDD, but I also wan't to get some unit tests for activity and flow coverage. It is still on my todo list. hope to get to it soon.
One more things on my "technology" todo list is google-analytics to collect usage data about the app.
I also started using Guice. When I decided to use it I also considered RoboGuice, but in the end I decided to go with pure Guice from few reasons: I a still consider myself as new to guice, so I want to get some experience on the regular usage of guice. I want to be able to apply my experience with it also to regular java applications and I didn't understand exactly what is the benefit of RoboGuice.
This is how I use guice: I init guice in my application startup and create a base activity that inject guice to the activity itself. All my activities are inherited from this activity. pretty straight-forward.
Marketing
My main concern now is advertising. When I told my friends about the app, they said it is nice idea. Its not that I am planning to make money out of it, but it will be nice to have many users. I have a friend "working" with me on marketing. He created a facebook page for the app.
Another friend wrote about it in his facebook page. He also suggested me a catchy description: "Pick your preferred messaging channel so friends contact U the way U choose!". Hopw it will catch.
Since the app is free, I don't see a reason for people not do download it. However, I still need to find a way to get to all those people. That is one of the reasons I wrote this post in English. I hope it will get some traction from readers or bots. I am still looking for ideas how people will see my app in the market. If you have any, I will be glad to hear...
It is also a bit difficult to explain what the app is doing. A blog post is a great place to do so.
So here are some links:
