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 
 
 
Well a couple of days ago Day Until hit the 10000 installed users. Yay! Judging from the ad impression statistic quite a few of them are sleeper installs. That is people who have installed it but are not using it daily. But still great motivation.

In slightly less good news a developer has created a widget that lets you display the number of days until an event. That is not a  problem in itself as I like competition. The trouble is he has decided to call it Days Until Widget. Which I am sure you would agree is a little close to my the name of my app that user could be a little confused.

So Just to be clear this is not an app we endorse or in anyway associated with. It is a shame some people try to benefit from the work other have put in using cheap tricks. As I said with a different name I would welcome the competition and that benefits everyone who likes these kind of apps!

Back to focusing on the more positive stuff. I am listening to your comments and am working on Days Until whenever I get some spare time. There are so many things I want to add and am I currently working on a display that lets you view multiple events. I have a few other apps at the design stage so life is fairly quite busy here at spider flock. 
 
 
Yep Another release of DayUntil has arrived. I am actually quite pleased with the result and I hope you will be as well. This time I have added the ability to store and manage multiple count downs. I am quite happy with the way the UI works, check out my application page for more details on how it works. Hopefully it fits in the what you expect.

I hope you like it. Of course the next thing I will work on is a display to you can see all the count downs at once.

Hopefully it won't be long before there are 10000 installed instance of Days Until. I know it is just a number but it is nice that many people at least like the app enough to not instantly uninstall it.
 
 
Tonight I sat down and produced a new version of PaceMan. I have now added the ability to convert from you pace to race distance. It is the sort of thing that is fairly hard to do on a calculator as there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.

PaceMan is my least popular app at the moment. It trails behind even Monster Match and that only has a 2 star rating on the market place. To be fair PaceMan has had a lot less time spent on it and really amounts to a few evenings hunched over the keyboard.

Hopefully this update will give PaceMan a gentle push in the right direction
 
 
I have posted an little update to Days Until. It does not add much in the way of features I am afraid. About a week ago when I decided to start work on an update I took a look at the app and wanted to change lots of things about it.


I tidied up the main screen to make it look a little nicer and fixed a bug in the "fire" bars may made then draw incorrectly for large numbers.


The preferences were also a little non mobile like. To be honest they look more like they belonged on a desktop program rather than a mobile app. I created a new screen for them and consolidated the options to make them accessible from one screen.  I hope you like the new look of them


The next update will contain more features. I am reading the comments and planning on implementing much of what is being requested. As I see it here are the most requested features in no specific order
  1. Different themes for the display
  2. Multiple countdowns, both storing and displaying
  3. Setting the exact time.

All of these features I definitely want to implement it just takes some time and they wont make it into the next release, although one might. I have to juggle working on Days Until with updating my other apps and attempting to create new apps and eventually some new games
 
PaceMan 01/05/2010
 
This little app is really itching an itch for myself. Running is my sport of choice and I occasional run a marathon. Having a little app that converts my run times into my average pace is something I just had to write. 


I admit I love mental arithmetic so enjoy attempting to do these calculations in my head but it is always good to have an app to check my often wrong estimate 


This is going to be another app like day of the week that does not garner much the way of downloads but I don't mind too much. 
 
 
One of the fun things about this time of the year is that it is very family orientated. As I have 3 children with the oldest 5 years old you can imagine family orientated translated into being incredibly busy and very tired at the end of the day. 


During this time having a clear few hours is a precious thing. My other half took the 3 little monsters off for a morning shopping. Usually I get on the computer and continue to create new apps, improve existing ones or just learn a new development technique or algorithm. Today was different I did some brainstorming for idea.

What is evident is I have plenty of ideas for the coming year that fall into a wide range of topics, hopefully by the end of the 2010 I should have plenty off apps here. I need to get focused and get producing

 
Welcome 12/27/2009
 
Yes, this is the new home for my android stuff. As you can see from the message at the bottom of this site it is being hosted using weebly. I am obviously impressed enough with weebly to decide to use them. Yes there free account seems to provide all the features I need at the moment. That a big plus as my Android Apps don't create a huge amount of income.

This weebly site should require less maintenance than a word press site. Well hopefully.

So what next is on the horizon for my android development. Well we are in the middle of a Christmas break so I am taking a week chilling without much development going on. Recharging the batteries is always a good thing and usually leads to some inspirational ideas.

What else should I include in a first post. Well SpiderFlock is not a full time business or anything close to it. The apps produced so far are totally free to download from the android marketplace