Moving my blog

I’ve moved my blog over to martinadamek.com. Older posts are also available at the new address.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/booleansplit / CC BY 2.0

A New Adventure

Two weeks ago I launched my first startup. It is a big moment for me because ever since I left Sun a year ago I have wanted to do so, even though I didn’t have a concrete idea. I mean, I had a few, but none of them seemed to be the right one.

While writing a blog post a few months ago, I realized how bad my English really is. It’s not disastrous, but far away from being a pleasing experience for any native speaker. I wished then that there was a service where I could upload my draft and it would be proofread and edited by a skilled editor in a reasonable time, for a reasonable cost. If I am putting such an effort into writing and publishing content, I should also care about how it is presented.

After some time Mira, a cousin of my wife, returned back to Prague from the US and decided to stay here permanently. I knew she was always crazy about spotting English mistakes in restaurants and everywhere else, had the proper certificates and was going to have a period of free time while looking for a new job. It seemed like a good opportunity, so we’ve put our heads together and decided to try it – to build an online English proofreading service.

Our goal is to build a simple yet useful service that will help bloggers, website makers, students, you name it, to polish their content. To make them feel better and more confident about how they represent themselves to the outside.

We are not raising any capital for this. No angels, no investors, just pure bootstrapping. And because I am too busy at my daily job, I decided to get it done by somebody else. Sounds crazy I know, I should do it all myself for free in the evenings. But because when I want anything I want it RIGHT NOW, I decided to outsource it. What a good idea that was! Implementation was done by a Prague startup called Inmite and the design by Martin Cohen, and both Michal from Inmite and Martin did a really good job. Of course there was so much additional work around it that I spent long nights doing analysis, wireframes, discussions, setups, fixes, etc., sleeping just few hours a day. But, after all, the advice from experienced entrepreneurs to release early and often seems to make sense.

Now we are out of private beta and available to everybody. We are not done yet, many things will come, many things will change, but we are out and we are serving our customers. We want to hear what’s bad, what should be different, and we will listen. We promised to ourselves to take personal care of everything, and to make your writing as good as if it was our own.

And yes, I am eating my own dog food and this blog post has been checked by Korekt.me.

APNdroid 2.0 coming

I am happy to announce first development builds of APNdroid 2.0. Thanks to Dmitry Pavlov (widget, russian translation, code improvements), Julien Muniak (Locale plugin), ‘juraad’ (Czech translation) you can download fresh test build of what’s going to be APNdroid 2.0.

So what’s new?

• We have a home screen widget! I can’t count how many people requested this.
  
• We have Locale plugin. Requested again and again and again…
  
• We would like to add support for MMS exclusion (that means new settings)
• Switching data on/off should be much faster, once we will verify one optimization

Overall, I am really happy that these guys jumped in. I had really a problem to find some time to work on APNdroid, but new commiters are just awsome. Also, application just passed 50.000 downloads and is getting more and more downloads per day. Increase of downloads is accelerated by articles on AndroidGuys and Lifehacker!

So if you are brave enough, go to the apndroid.googlecode.com and grab the .apk file from Downloads section and file any bugs or enhancements. Don’t forget to enable installation from unknown sources in phone settings.

Android Market Statistics

Now, that I have found few minutes to have a look at APNdroid and released its source code, I will post also some interesting numbers. If you have a look at AndroidStats you can see that APNdroid rank in Market was falling constantly for some time.

I thought it was obvious, as new apps were coming in every day. Interesting thing is that once number of daily downloads of APNdroid touched the values somwhere above 200, situation has changes. Rank is getting higher now. This is APNdroid rank in Market overall:

This is visualization of daily downloads:

And this is nice view of total downloads/active installs/comments grow since I started to track it back in February. If you are interested in which tracking tool I am using – it is Google Docs SpreadSheet And yes, there are already 30.000 downloads…

APNdroid source code released

I just pushed first revision of APNdroid to Mercurial repository at http://code.google.com/p/apndroid. It is released under GPL v3 license and it corresponds to the APNdroid version 1.2.2, which is actual version at the Android Market. There are many requests from the users to enhance the application in several ways, ignoring MMS APNs is probably the most wanted. Also, several developers asked if they can have access to the source code, so this is the answer – contribute enhancements, patches, translations and wiki if you wish and first of all – enjoy!

New progress on Android plugin for NetBeans

If you were following bug and commit activity on nbandroid.kenai.com recently, you must be really impressed by the work that Radim has done. Many bugs are fixed now. Plugin works in NetBeans 6.7 and supports Android SDK 1.5. Also, you can keep in touch with project on new project’s blog at www.nbandroid.com. For all what’s new, here’s just the screenshot of Android devices listed in NetBeans (recent contribution from Tomas). Good job, guys.

Some stats

Since wednesday I am down in my bed with high temperature, feeling quite bad. Today I am able to get online for a while. I thought it might be a good opportunity to find the time to write new post.

Shortly after last post, I changed APNdroid again. First, now it is pure toggle – after you press it’s icon, notification with appropriate icon will appear in status bar. Once you want more details, just open the notification. I am pretty happy with this behavior and it also seems to fit in Android quite well. Another change I made is that now not just name of APN is changes but also APN type (last item in APN settings). I added this on request from several users reporting that under some carriers APN name is ignored and APN is still used to connect to internet. Change of APN type is resolving this.

Let’s have a look at some statistics about APNdroid. First, it really doesn’t break the records in downloads, but what makes me feel good is feedback from users. You can read some comments on Cyrket. Also rating (4.27 out of 5) feels good. Now to the number of downloads. This is how it looks in Android Market developer console right now:

I am tracking downloads since mid-February and on graph it looks like this:

Do you see that dramatic change? That’s what happened when Market started to support update notifications. What is also interesting, number of active installs jumped from 33% to 50% constantly.

APNdroid update

I just pushed the new version of APNdroid to the Android Market. Some users asked for toggle-like behaviour, so that’s the major change in version 1.1. The fact is that APNdroid is still not 100% toggle, because it opens popup with status after it’s done with APN settings modifications. Tapping anywhere on screen closes the popup. I feel like it is quite important to give this feedback to user, but let’s see reactions to this. Did I say this was the major change? Well, there’s changed icon too The new one follows typical Android icons style, while the old one was in the iPhone style. Hmm, I might change this with every update, I am never satisfied with my artwork next day after releasing something…

New update and issue tracking for nbandroid

I just pushed new update (0.2) to nbandroid update center, so you should get an update notification in NetBeans or you can invoke it directly by clicking Help -> Check for updates. This update contains several bugfixes and few enhancements like displaying AndroidManifest.xml in project view.

If you clicked on the bugs link above, you could see that there’s no Bugzilla, but JIRA instead. Hurray! Kenai guys prepared nice gift for project admins, so my big thanks goes to them. As nbandroid doesn’t have that many bugs, I migrated them all to JIRA (just one or two unimportant attachments are lost) and now you can enjoy much better experience in bug tracking. I am sure it was not just poor integration of Bugzilla into Kenai, JIRA simply feels much better. In fact this was my biggest pain in using Kenai for project hosting. Now I just wish they provide support for closed source projects.

APNdroid

One of the differences between my old Nokia E61 and new G1 is that G1 (or Android, to be more precise) does not ask me whether or not I want to connect to internet. Well, I have unlimited data plan (hmm, with 150MB FUP), but if you are in the roaming, with disabled roaming data access in phone’s settings, some 3rd party applications can still access the internet. Not just for that reason (I wanted to have control over it anyway) I started to modify my APN settings by changing access point name by appending some character whenever I wanted to be sure phone is offline. Later I created small utility for that to do that on one click for me. Just 2 days ago I decided to sign up for the Android Market and publish my applications there under name APNdroid. Interesting experience, I must say.

Some idiots are having great fun commenting on applications with ‘First!’ or with even unrelated posts about whatever on earth. Also, I never realized that user could install my application, disable internet and the uninstall it. Then they were offline and without WiFi connection or APN settings knowledge they were not able to fix it. Some crazy things like hard-resetting the phone and calling T-Mobile support were reported. Ouch! Sorry about that, guys! I already wanted to put application down from the store, but then I received some very positive feedback, so I added big warning in application description for now. I am not able to figure out how can I listen in application on its removal from system, but I’ll keep researching on that. Let’s have a look at the APNdroid in few screenshots. It’s dead simple, so don’t expect anything bombastic

This is all of the application’s interface (icon, and one screen). Once the button is selected, you have to wait for a while as system needs to respond to the change and it might take few seconds (it’s not in my control, change done by APNdroid is just cause of the system event).

And here the Android system settings with modified APNs. You can fix names by yourself if you uninstalled APNdroid with disconnected internet. You can find it under Settings->Wireless controls->Mobile networks->Acces Point Names. As you can see, only thing application does is appending ‘apndroid’ suffix to name of all APNs in your system.