Category Archives: Countdown Widget

Android, Auto Respond, Countdown Widget, Tic-Tac-Toe

News

A bunch of random stuff in this one…

Auto Respond

First, I’ve released a few new versions of Auto Respond since my last post. All just bug fixes. I released another one this morning for Pro users, which fixes a FC when deleting a schedule. If you have received this FC, the schedule was still deleted properly but it closed while trying to update the view.

A few weeks ago I added another stat to keep track of in Auto Respond. Each time it sends a message, Analytics tallies it. In the first 7 days of June, Auto Respond has sent 53 messages! That’s an average of almost 8 messages per day! I found that to be a pretty cool statistic. (especially since some people still have older versions installed that don’t send that information, so the number could potentially be higher.)

Countdown Widget

If you follow me on Google+, or other social media, you may have noticed that I posted last night about a Beta version of my Countdown Widget app. A few updates about that:

  1. The app STILL has not been actually published to the Play Store. I’m not sure why this one is taking so long, but after reading through some stuff in the developer’s console, it says it could take up to 24-hours to become live. Which means that it could be as late as 11pm Eastern Time tonight. (8pm for you West coasters.)
    1. EDIT: It’s live now! But it only shows up in the Play Store AFTER becoming a tester! (As there is no publicly available version right now)
  2. While reading through that documentation, I also noticed that all of my testers have to be in either a Google Group, or a Google+ Community to use the link and get the Beta. I created a community a while back, and right now it only has 4 users (including me.) If you would like to use the Countdown Widget Beta (and future app betas) join my community! (Again, this is a restriction put forth by Google, not me.) https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/103951105335573781027
Right now the app is fairly basic… put in a title and a date, and you get a widget which shows how many days until your event. There are also options to put a specific time with that date, and options to display hours left instead of days left, or display hours left when less than a certain amount of hours are left.
In the future I’m going to add a lot more options, like changing background color and transparency (right now it’s black with 50% transparency,) possibly changing text size and color, rearranging the data that is displayed, and more designs and sizes of widgets.
The widget is resizable now if you have an Android version or a home screen launcher that supports it (I think resizing widgets was added in 3.0, but certain 2.x launchers may support it) but there is only 1 design. I have plans for more designs that will default to larger sizes.
Tic Tac Toe
I said before that I am going to build Google Games features into Tic Tac Toe… and I still plan on doing that. However, I still have not had the time to do that. I am working on a lot of stuff right now, and even the things mentioned above have had minimal work done. I’ve had Countdown Widget almost working for a while, and just finished up some last minute things over the past couple days.
Android, Countdown Widget

New app?

Today has been one of those days that my mind has been wandering…. and wandering to good places. This is the result of one of those wanderings.

I’ve been using a countdown widget app for quite some time now, and recently the developer updated the app and completely ruined it in my opinion. I have not downloaded the most recent update because it looks terrible, and there are a bunch of negative reviews about how transparency was removed, and it overall did not look good. So I kept the old version, so that I could keep my widget as-is.

So suddenly I started thinking… I could make an app like this. And it wouldn’t really take too long. I’ve got the gist of widgets now, I’ve done a count-down type of code with the schedules, and I can add in a TON of customization from what I have learned doing both Auto Respond and Tic Tac Toe.

So here it is… some ideas for my countdown widget app:

  • Information
    • Name/Title of event
    • Date (optional? – only time – repeat daily)
    • Option – Time
      • Either date or time would be required if date becomes optional
    • Option – Show hours instead of days 
    • Option – Show hours when less than X days left
  • Look and feel
    • Selectable color/image for background
    • Selectable transparency for background
    • Text
      • Selectable color for all text
      • All text same color checkbox
      • Customizable text order
        • Text1 – Name
        • Text2 – Date
        • Text3 – Days/hours remaining
    • Stock images (to come later)
  • Selectable size in setup? (? = not sure if this is possible in the setup screen)
    • 1×1
    • 2×1
    • 2×2 with picture background
    • 3×3 (?) with picture on side (? = I’d have to play with sizes for this one, to see what works best)
  • Show preview of widget as changes are made
  • Option – Remove widget automatically when countdown reaches 0
  • Option – notification/alarm when countdown reaches 0
    • alert sound
    • alert vibrate
These are the notes I’ve made for myself so far. Any other ideas you can think of for a countdown widget? 
It’s a simple idea but, as you have probably noticed in my other apps, I like options and customization! 🙂