Wridgways

APRIL 2012

Mobile Development android-app-development

Home/Office moving service application for express quotation with email functionality and maps indication for branch locations.

Android Picture Puzzle Game

AUGUST 2011

Game Development

A simple picture puzzle game that lets you choose the pictures from your sdcard as puzzle. With timer that you can choose if decreasing or increasing while playing for setting high scores.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gscreatives.picturepuzzle

Making sure your mobile application is properly tested

Having your mobile application tested over and over and over again consistently on a set of use cases and over the edge scenarios is REALLY important. Especially if you want it to be really a part of your business or your brand or your ecosystem successfully. Especially when you want to profit from it. which is, all businesses want. Unless your a non-profit organization and just want to make the world a better place, by eradicating hunger, for example.

Anyway, I can't reiterate enough how important it is. Every app, not just mobile apps, goes through a series of changes or updates through its years of existence. For example, you have your Dev refactor it to be more performance optimized because you figured through analytics that the 3 sec lag you have between your splash screen and your app's main screen (which is a large images of images, for example) just doesn't cut it for your users. They either just close the app before the splash screen even ends or they don't open your app as much as they would if it starts up faster.

So you have your Dev optimize your app's launch speed and, viola! now it loads in under a sec! This is great news! Then you publish the update and you can hear ca-ching! ca-ching! (in your head) as you anticipate higher user engagement. but then.. boom! You're bombarded with bad reviews on that same day! what happened? "now my feed's all messed up! it shows wrong order of my images and entries after I updated!" one user writes. "now when I click on one of my feeds it shows the wrong details!" another user said". "I can't view it now without having a headache! the text is all cropped out at the end for my image description. your latest update sucks!"

Ugh! this is a classic and very common case of an-update-gone-bad-because-it-was-not-thoroughly-tested. And this is where automated testing is a must. it's a must for all apps. Or at least for all apps that have dreams of being awesome.

Never settle for less. Have your app tested. Thoroughly. Automatically. And be on your way to ca-ching! ca-ching!

Supercharge your business with mobile application development

If you are a small to medium enterprise business owner or you are responsible for your company's growth it is essential to bring your business to mobile. This is called taking your business to the next level.

Why?

Because all (or almost all) people are on mobile now. It doesn't matter if they're pre-teens, teens, adults, or baby boomers. They use mobile devices. And not just mobile devices but smartphones. 

They use it to communicate, to get information, to do business, to market themselves, to do presentations, etc.

And it almost doesn't matter what industry your business is. Most certainly than not, you will need a mobile application or a mobile presence. 

If you're in the medical industry, 

you will need your potential users to be able to easily browse and discover you while they are on the go (a.ka. on mobile). Or you will want to really supercharge your medical business and be able to let your users book appointments with you based on your available schedules, or notify your users when you have an announcement to make. These are just a few examples of how mobile presence can put you above the rest in the medical industry.

If you're in the fashion retail industry, 

you will need your users to get notified of your promos and events. You want your users to be able to see themselves wearing your latest products just by using their phones. You want your users to be able to pay using their smartphones after they have browsed your catalogue in your mobile application.

If you're a hotel owner, 

you will want your users to be able to browse how beautiful and top of the line your amenities are. You will want to guide them in your hotel in such a way that it will be very tempting an experience for them. You can do this with your mobile application's virtual reality. And after they're so much engaged in their experience in your mobile app, they'll book right there and then, through your app.

And many other industries (actually almost all if not all) will benefit greatly from having a mobile application. All it will take is the creativity to leverage your strengths and put it in the hands of your market.

So what are you waiting for? 

Give your users mobility, better user experience, and innovative ways of connecting with your products and services through your mobile application. And in return they will give back their loyalty, patronage and amazing word-of-mouth for your business.

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

Making your List of Products to Product Detail User experience properly

It's the little things that make or break the user experience don't you agree? I definitely agree with this. Just in one of my apps, I have a scenario that I think would be a good example right now to drive this point.

In one of my ecommerce Android App that displays products and product details by clicking on a particular product the user can go back to the list of products from the product detail view by clicking on the Back button on their device or by clicking on the back button on top of the app located on the top left corner of the app. This is a basic navigation drawer UI pattern for Android.

Going back to the products list through the Toolbar Back icon

Going back to the products list through the Back button of Device

The user experience is broken in going back to the products list through the Toolbar back icon. It reloads the products list again after going back from the product detail. This isn't what we want do we? And certainly this is not what your users expect.

In order to solve this default behavior of the back icon in the toolbar for your use case we have to know why this is happening. This is happening because the back icon in the toolbar will call the onCreate method of the products list activity again. While pressing the Back button of the device will only show the product list (which is what we want for this scenario).

The Solution

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