A Busy Time 03/31/2010
 
I took a week or so off from android development. It was my birthday and we had a chill out time and a weekend away from the children. Grandparents baby sat for us. We got to eat dinner in restaurants in a calm and restful way and even managed a trip to the cinema.


While we was away an iphone developer contacted me and via this blog and asked me to change the name of my latest little app. It clashed with his app called Pizza Calculator. Well we are in to different markets and the apps do two different things but I was more than happy to change the name of my app. His app looks pretty cool by the way. Google for iphone pizza calculator if you want to know more.


I have also pushed out small updates to all my little apps updating the Admob advertising. No extra features added, just a refresh to keep everything current. Days Until will get a new Admob codes when I push out the next update.  And that won't be long as I am in the middle of testing it all works.
 
Pizza Calculator 03/18/2010
 
I had the idea for this little app while in the frozen pizza section of the local super market. I was buying pizza for the familiy and wondered whether it was better value to get two larger ones or 3 or four smaller ones. That day pizza calculator was born and I started work on it the following night.  

Left over pizza is always devoured by hungry little hand at lunch the following day. 


Pizza calculator is very simple and did not take long to create. I don't expect it to be a great success but I had fun creating it over the two evenings it took to build it. And lets be honest having fun is a important as knowing which pizza offers the best value :)


 
 
It has been a busy week here,

I have finally got to the bottom of all the problems I had on my list of Days Until and pushed it out an upgrade for everyone. It does feel like this release was hard earned on my part. While the change to people using the app is minimal, I fixed a few bugs and added a display that could handle multiple events it took a fair amount of rework and finding some of the bugs in the program was quite difficult. 

Of course finding difficult bugs does have a silver lining, I know understand more about programming on android and that growing experience is great to have.

The PaceMan update added split times for those that want to know these when working out how long it would take to run a certain distance. PaceMan is one of my least popular apps but I felt this quick update would be useful to the people who do use it.

This coming week I am going to be in chlll mode perhaps I will work on another quick app before I dive back into improving Days Until or perhaps I jump back into Days Until without a break. There is so much to add in Days Until.
 
 
The title say it all really. A big thank you to everyone who use and has rated Days Until. 

Why you may ask? Well Google recently announced that any developer who has an application on the market place with over 5000 downloads and a rating of 3.5 stars or more will receive a free phone. Thanks to everyone who has rated and downloaded Days Until, I have qualified!

I admit I was a little sceptical about the whole thing when I got the email and considered some sort of scam, as did many other developers. But once it was confirmed I filled in the forms and yesterday got the confirmation that they would be shipping a phone to me. 

Being in Europe I will receive a nexus one. The funny thing is the night before I received the initial email I nearly brought one, being tired out and not wanting to hunt down my credit card was the only reason I didn't!

While I am grateful to Google for being so generous it is to all you guys who took your time to download and rate Days Until that receive an equal measure of gratitude. For someone who creates free apps and does not earn that much from the advertising receiving a free phone is a very nice surprise. It will certainly help with the development and testing of applications.

I am very close to shipping another upgrade for Days Until, that will enable you to display multiple events, I have spent the past week chasing down problems when the orientation changes. Hopefully I have now got them all but want to spend a few more days testing before releasing. 

Nearing the end of the month I am hoping to actually find some time to work on another application but life does seem quite busy at the moment as I am having to fit in a fair amount of training for a marathon I plan to do at the start of May.

Again, thanks to all those that helped