Friday, May 10, 2013

Google Play Store updated to Version 4

After glimpses of screen shots on the web, I finally received the update for Google Play Store and it is a major version jump this time, to 4! When you launch the updated Play Store, a redesigned Page greets you.


There is a lot of white space and padding between icons and doesn't feel cluttered a bit. You can Purchase or install an app directly from this screen by clicking on the vertical 3 dots next to the app name without having to go into the app description page.


A set of movies from  Play Movies also appears on the main page of the store in a similar style.


The list of installed apps page is also tweaked slightly.


Friday, May 03, 2013

Message Counter for Android

Development has been going on a simple Android application called "Message Counter".

How the Message application works on an Android phone will vary greatly based on the OS Version as well as any modification done by the manufacturer like HTC, Samsung etc.

So as the message details are stored on a device using SQLite and whose contents can be accessed programmatically, I decided to write up an app called MessageCounter. The first version was completed quite fast, but in order to support Android 2.3 and up, some sacrifices were made regarding the UI and performance.

Taking advantage of Fragments, ActionBar etc introduced in later versions of Android (3.0, Honeycomb), a new version was created re using code from the first version.

The V2 of Message Counter was completed in a matter of hours and improves on performance and UI. Below are the screenshots of the app. You can find an update to this post if and when the app is made available on Google Play Store.

There are plans of making the source code open source and will be hosted at GitHub. An update to this post will include the details.

Update 1 : The project is now available on GitHub at this address : https://github.com/midhunhk/message-counter. The source code is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0