Sunday, May 11, 2014

In Android May is month number four

So I published my Android app yesterday. But it didn't work as expected. Information was missing in the display. After debugging I found out that the missing information was not there in the parsed result either. Was there a bug in the XML parser? I debugged that too, but could not find anything that was wrong. Yet when I made the same search in the browser the information was there in the result.

And then I found it! It turned out that my app was searching not today's date, but a month ago. Most of the information was the same, but some was missing. The reason for this was that I pretty late in the project removed the ASAP I had used before and instead used a date field, automatically filled in with a date, that should have been today's, but was actually a month ago.

And the reason for this is how Android Calendar work:

  • calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH) will get you the month number where January is month zero
  • calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH) will get you the day of the month, where the first day is one
Not very intuitive, even if I assume ther is some logic in it. Anyway, a quick bugfix and new upload to Google Play means that very few users, if any, have been affected.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

New app published

Today I published a new app on Google play: Skåne Transport

It is an app for Local Transport in my home region, Skåne in the south of Sweden. It helps you find trains and busses (and perhaps ferrys) when travelling in Skåne and to adjacent regions like Copenhagen, Göteborg etc.

From a user perspective I have had two goals for the app:

  1. It should be easy to search. You should be able to do most of your searches without typing. I do this by keeping history, making it easy to add favorites and having a preloaded list of the most important stations with the app when it is installed. The user also has the option to use her current location.
  2. The information should be as accurate as possible. If I have information about delays, the app shows te delayed time rather than the one from the timetable (colored in red so that it should be clear for the user that there is a delay)
I'm pretty satisfied with the result. Let's see what the users think.