electrozoic

After many months of development and testing, I’m excited to announce that the first beta of my first Android app, Ride In Style, has been released to the App Market on behalf of Pinpoint Pickup! I’m sure there will be many more challenges to come as the app is deployed to different types of devices and exposed to different usage patterns, but I’m looking forward to discovering those challenges and building a great experience for our riders.

The basic idea of Ride In Style is to be able to quickly and easily book a swanky towncar ride using your smartphone. The first app built was for iOS, so I modeled my development after the existing iPhone app. Since this was my first time programming Android, I learned the Android APIs as well as other concepts that I hadn’t fully explored in my previous work in systems/clustered computing:

• Using a RESTful API to build a client/server app
• Using Java’s HTTP libraries
• Integrating Google’s Maps and Search APIs
• Building a user interface capable of handling phone orientation changes
• Handling system resource usage appropriately for small handheld devices
• Being a solo developer and managing my own learning/troubleshooting processes

 

Fortunately, there are so many resources on StackOverflow and across the web which I’ve been able to use to learn and guide my development. I’ll plan on sharing more of what I’m working on (with code samples!) in the near future.