mduffor

A few of the screens from the "30 Days To Zen" app.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been getting up to speed on Android app development. In addition to pouring over the Android SDK docs on the android developer site, I’ve been Googling the heck out of the various questions I run into. More times than not, I wind up over at http://stackoverflow.com where it seems most API questions under the sun have been talked about at one point or another. So a huge “thank you” goes out to the coders over there.

For my first app, I’ve teamed up with my friend Mark Rosenberg to write an app that supports his eBook on meditation techniques. Mark is supplying the expertise on meditation and the content for the guided lessons, and I’m providing the code and art to create a meditation timer that ties in with the text. In addition to a customize-able mediation timer, the app has support for logging your progress, lessons on meditation, and guided audio meditation so you can close your eyes and let the voice in the headphones lead you to Zen enlightenment. Or at least to relax and de-stress for a while.

If you are interested in following this project, we have a Facebook Page up with the website to follow. I’ll also be posting my progress here from time to time, and will of course announce when the app and eBook go on sale.

I started working on the app in my spare time and had several weeks where I didn’t get a chance to touch the code at all. But now that I’m done packing up our house and we’ve officially relocated to a new state, I’ve been able to buckle down over the past few days and get the app much closer to a releasable state. It still needs testing and polish, but almost all of the main functionality is now in. Most of the work now lies in finishing up the text and getting it into the app, recording the guided meditation, adding the ability to post your progress to your Facebook account, and some additional visual polish. Then of course comes the testing, tweaking, polishing, re-testing, etc. I’m not going to try and guess when this will all hit the app store, but I’m glad to at least have it far enough along where our beta testers can start to play with it.

Next up I’m looking forward to digging into the NDK more so I can use my existing code base on a portable device. My next personal app is going to be along the lines of a digital toy where the user can interact with a 3d character. I’m going to start roughing in the framework over the next couple of weeks, and hopefully it will go much easier once my desktop machine arrives in the shipment of our stuff and I can stop using a netbook whose screen resolution and processor isn’t much better than the smartphone itself!

Cheers,
Michael

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This entry was posted by mduffor on Sunday, June 24th, 2012 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Android, App Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.