Aquifer 1.0 January 2010	Monitor the water table levels of the San Antonio Edwards Aquifer from your Android phone. If the levels begin to get low, the respective water usage restriction stage (I through IV) and their severity color is displayed. Also includes a water conservation tip of the day. Developed this on the Mac using Eclipse and ADT. No real problems found with this; third times the charm. What's new for me is that it connects to the Internet to pull down an XML stream from the Edwards Aquifer Authority, and has a hyperlink on the main page that points to the site.
Russian Flashcards 1.1 January 2010	A quick and easy way to learn and review the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet on your Android phone. Developed this on the Mac using Eclipse and ADT. It's mostly XML with a little Java code for the about and quit menu items. Most of the work went into creating 34 separate images. Scrollview takes care of the smooth UI.
ABICalculator 1.1 December 2009	Most of the development for this app was done on Ubuntu 9.10, then finished up on Mac. This is a proof of concept project to work through how to publish an Android app. It cost me $25 to get signed up with the Marketplace, whereas iPod/iPhone development costs $100 to sign up with the App Store (then your app has to be approved.) Also, XCode is preferred tool for Apple development, while Eclipse with Google's ADT plug in leaves XCode in the dust in my (and may others') opinion. Plus, you can develop for the Android on any platform--for Apple of course you pretty much need a Mac. Lastly, I like Google's app structure, it's a combination of XML and Java, reminding me much of a sane version of Struts or Rails. It's easy to get the hang of and there is a good Android community out there with plenty of answers. Some learning lessons from my first Android project: Using the Android SDK and AVD Manager, if you have problems downloading AVD packages from https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml, go to Settings and check Force https://...sources to be fetched using http://... Do not just enter a new source with an http:// address as another newsgroup posting recommends. This cost me a couple hours of reinstalling on Mac and Ubuntu until I got it working. Test on an actual Android device before deploying, as already strongly recommended by Google. My first version I deployed for API 1.6, because I assumed my phone was running this. I was wrong. My phone is actually running 1.5, which explains why I couldn't find my app in the Marketplace. Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) currently has an issue that prevents the OS from seeing a plugged in Android device. Something with the USB drivers--I'm still looking at this. Get your package name straight from the beginning of the project--it's a pain to change it later on. If you do change it, make sure the application manifest also has the current package name When downloading to your phone, if you already have installed the debug version from when you were developing the app, be sure to uninstall the app from your phone before installing it from the Marketplace. Otherwise, you may get a "code not signed correctly" error. The manifest doesn't save all the time--edit the XML just to be sure Version 1.1 released late April, 2010 to parse HTML data output versus the XML version the Aquifer site used to have.
ABICalculator 1.1	Made app 1.5 compatible 1.5 and 1.6 treat RelativeLayout very differently. I went with TableLayout to keep it simple. Still has bug when changing orientation to landscape that causes the app to crash. Working on this

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