Levelling Up Your Android App's User Experience Awesomeness

Your Android App had finally been completed and published in the market. You get a decent number of downloads and your users love using it. You get an average of 4.1 ratings. That's great! Business is slowly picking up with your app's downloads and usage. Yet you notice in your app's Analytics that there's some room for improvement when it comes to your user's engagement. You know your user's should use your app more often in a day. After all it's so awesome and it does what it says it does.

You keep pulling your hair out when you notice your competition's trending more on the market. You wonder why.

I tell you, if your functionality is awesome, your app don't have any bugs,.. Maybe it's the little things. After all, the devil is in the details. Maybe you need to level up your App's Awesomeness. How?

When was the last time you had your dev update your app to reflect a new paradigm in User Experience. It's now time for you to incorporate Material Design in your Awesome Android App to drive up your users' engagement even more and crush your competition!

Your App looks like this right now:




Here's Levelling Up your App Looks Like:

So what are you waiting for? Level up your Apps' Awesomeness through Levelling up your User's Experience

Open sourced my very first Android App: GSC Picture Puzzle ^_^

https://github.com/gilsaints88/GSCPicturePuzzle

Feel free to grab the code, contribute to it, and use it on your own app :)

a few of the implementations used:

-Dialogs

-TableLayout and TabLayout

-Splash Screen

-Getting image from device to be used in puzzle

-Making images randomly selected for puzzle

-Game timer

-Saving screen of puzzle for game saving

-Adding border to puzzle image

My Ultimate Journey to Android

I've been programming for eight years now. I started as a Java Applications Developer usually doing Enterprise Level Web Apps in different industries like healthcare, sales management, human resources management. Being involved with frameworks like Spring, Struts, EJB, plain Servlets & JSPs. I did this for about 5 years until I fully shifted to Mobile development (for Android & iOS). At first I just self studied Android while doing Java Enterprise Development for HP at Mckinley Hills. My first Android app was a picture puzzle

Then I got a part time freelance work and the rest as they say, is history.

Now, I'm doing Android development and also iOS development and I noticed (and realized) that my Android development skills are not that good. At least not as good as I want it to be. I still have a hard time sometimes on implementing a bit complex situations on Activities, and Fragments. Especially Fragments. And I still haven't really used Content Provider for my app. At least not in a simple situation. I don't have the design skills yet to pull off a really rocking Android UI.

Other Android topics I am keen to master:

• Services
• Broadcast Receivers
• Device Compatibility
• Providing Resources
• Securities & Permissions
• Processes & Threads
• http://developer.android.com/guide/components/fundamentals.html
• Menus & ActionBars
• http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/tablets-and-handsets.html

So my resolve for this year of 2015 is to Level Up my Android development skills. May the geek goddesses help me with this endeavor.

Installation error: INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE

I have recently experienced

Installation error: INSTALL_FAILED_INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE in my Android application when I am trying to Run and install my app on the emulator.

What I did was: add -partition-size 1024 when launching the emulator.

Make Android Allocate More Memory on your App

android:largeHeap="true". Introduced in Android 3.0 (API Level 11)

Beginner's Error in Android

Currently I don’t get why I am experiencing this error in Android. Hopefully when I study Android’s intricacies further then I will be able to understand the reason behind this error….

I found a similar case (actually there are a lot of cases where developers encounter this same if not related error in android development) of The specified Child already has a parent Error in developing Android applications. Here's another case of Specified child already has a parent.

Basically, you should call removeView from the parent View first before adding another Child View. Either that or consider designing your code in a different way.

Started reading The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development-3.1.

started reading The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development-3.1. (But my top priority will still be being able to make a product)

(Update on this blog, after almost a month. I think). Right now I have put down the e-book temporarily because I was so busy during the last weeks but I am meaning to get back on reading The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development-3.1.

You can follow Mark Murphy of the book mentioned from commonsware.com

Right now I can say that the book is a good read from what I have read and browsed so far in the book. It features useful basic API of the Android UI components' functionalities.

Effective way to add Google APIs

http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/addon.xml
.
.
and http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml
.
.
This is effective especially if you have crappy internet connection or if you are installing on an offline machine.
Reference: http://qdevarena.blogspot.com/2010/05/download-android-sdk-standalone-for.html and another one that is also useful is http://anggriawan.web.id/2010/08/android-sdk-for-offline-installation.html

Playing with Android Again

currently I’ve been playing around android again. w/c is a good thing. and I’m having fun with it.


References: photos from http://android.gadgetsdog.com/popular-games-ios-bug-village-receives-update/ and http://www.purevpn.com/blog/android-and-vpn/

Installing ADT 12 on my Eclipse Helios

using http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ (I wasn’t able to fetch using https)


References: Images from http://j2me4dev.blogspot.com/2010/06/eclipse-helios-release-has-arrived.html and http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/android-sdk-and-eclipse-adt-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/

Bought Android Action Figure

bought android robot figure at wellcom for 399 (buy one take one) then I sold the other one to sherwin for 200

Eclipse Galileo for Android

Right now I am using Eclipse Galileo on my T61 ubuntu Jaunty laptop for my Android development. My Eclipse Galileo has Android Development Toolkit 0.9.4

blogging from my android

yeah i love it wid d blogger-droid!!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.3.5

An Android Todo List Program

I am now starting development on my very own android todo list program (the official name of the program will be disclosed in the future).. it will have a todo list of course, and it will also come with alarms, calendar event markings, goals, and other features as well..

Finished with Wrox Professional Android Application Development

Yeah!.. just finished reading and delving in this great book... =). Now it's time for real action :-)