This morning, I uploaded my first application to the Android Market. As a quick background, Android is Google's new mobile operating system, designed for smartphones and similar mobile internet devices, and similar in theory to the iPhone operating system. The Android Market allows third party developers to distribute their software through a centralized location for a small fee. As of right now, all software on the market is free, so you don't make any money on the process.
I decided, for some reason, that my first application was going to be a LiveJournal client, that is, an application that enables easy posting to a LiveJournal blog. I would be able to work with simple HTTP requests, design a simple but effective user interface, play with threads a little bit, and touch the Location Manager (GPS/Tracking) if I was lucky.
I was.
I'm happy with the final product, and it's modular enough that I can add to it later if I wanted to, or fork it to a generic blog posting tool if I felt crazy enough. You can log into your LJ account, select user pictures from a live gallery of all of your user icons, dynamically retrieve your location from GPS or fuzzy tracking, add moods or your current music. It's remarkably complete for a few days of work, and I think I want to add the ability to attach photos later on, as well as limit to certain friend groups or post to other communities. Trivial tasks in the long run, but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible.
Click through if you want to see what it looks like.
You can click these images to get a full 320x480 view.
Login screen, pretty simple. This authenticates you to LJ, so ElJay can grab user pictures, moods, groups, etc.
Initial post screen, with a subject and a body. It starts out bare so you have room to type, but via the below menu or the Settings menu, you can set which fields it shows by default.
When you hit the menu key, this is what appears. Change settings, edit the user picture, or add fields to your post screen.
This is the post screen after adding all three fields. You can even use the built in wifi/cell mapping or GPS to get your actual or approximate location via the 'Get' button.
Userpic browser. Uses the standard image chooser in Android to show you all of your user pics. Just flick your finger to scroll through the available pictures. Hit back to cancel.
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