Material design device metrics

A useful reference to know everything about Android device resolutions: https://material.io/devices/ 

Your player photos on My Team Manager: available now in the Android version 3.4.0

Many users have requested this feature and finally it's here: it is now possible add the player photo from the camera or gallery of your Android phone.

The new version 3.4.0 has the following new features:

• Possibility to add photo for players
• Added tactics 3-2-4-1 and 3-2-3 for football 9 vs 9
• Fix for trainings serie deletion
• Several bugfix and improvements

The player photo capability will be available soon also for the iPhone version.

Download the new Android version clicking here

My Team Manager (for Android) is now also available for volleyball. Check out all its functionalites but adapted for this sport:

• Manage more than one team
• Manage your roster and your players' info and statistics
• Rate your players performances and see the average rating
• Add your team's matches, the calls-up, the lineup and your personal notes, the results, the points, the minutes played. Share them with your players via  the team Facebook page, SMS, WhatsApp or email
• Statistic section with team (segmented by competition) and players stats (more points, more winning services, best ratings average, minutes played, match and training attendance)
• Indicate the type of the matches (league, cup, friendly, other) and use it to filter
• Add and manage your training sessions
• Manage training attendance
• add your team's logo
• configure the medical visit date for your players, the medical center and send to everyone a message (SMS, whatsapp, email) to remind the appointment
• Send any message via SMS, WhatsApp, email or on your team's Facebook page
• Massive import of players from your phonebook

Download it from Google Play and send us your feedback to myteammanagerservice@gmail.com

MakeAppIcon: easily creation of your application icons

The service MakeAppIcon helps you when you need to create multiple sizes icons for your applications.

You can drag and drop your original image (preferably 1024x1024) in the toaster's home page and after few seconds you will have all the needed icons for your iOS (iWatch included) and Android application.

You can enter your email address to receive everything directly in your inbox.

My Team Manager: new version 2.5 is available

My Team Manager new version is available on Google Play, Blackberry App World and Nokia Store.

What's new in 2.5? Here you are:

• Whatsapp integration (to send callsup, matches, messages to your contacts)

• Massive import of players from your phonebook

• Use of Gmail account to prefill the email field in login and signup page (only for device with Google service)

• Several bugfix and improvements

Download it and let us know what you think.

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How new Google Play policy impacts mobile advertising

An interesting post on AppsFire blog explains how the new Google Play policy impact mobile advertising, mainly the trendy "Native Ads".

What Google wants to achieve is clearer advertisement messages for the user. Today there are many applications hiding them in the application using a look and feel well mixed with the rest of the interface deceiving the user who can't distinguish between what it is an application content and what it is an advertising content.

This is what new Google Play policy claims:

Apps published on Google Play may not directly or indirectly engage in or benefit from the following behavior

• Promotion via deceptive ads on websites, apps or other properties, including simulated system, service, or app notifications or alerts.

• Promotion or install tactics which cause redirection to Google Play or the download of the app without informed user action.

• Unsolicited promotion via SMS services.

It is your responsibility to ensure that no ad network or affiliate uses such methods to direct users to pages tat make your app available for download.

Developers must be assure that the adv networks they use comply the rules above.

The new policy hits both native and interstitial advertising where it is now required to be very clear (place a native ads in your app feed needs a clear way to inform user that it's an ad),  to be dismissible, explain what is promoted (no more interstitial message "Download app of the day") and who is running the campaign and with a clear "call to action" button.

A true Android OS for wearable device is coming

Google executive Sundar Pichai announced Sunday, during the Southwest conference, a release of an Android SDK for wearable devices in two weeks.

The first Google smartwatch should be on the market thanks to LG electronics and the idea to push developers towards this new line of development is to give the OS for free to the device manufacturers following a plan similar to the one deployed for smartphones and tablets.

With releasing the development kit before the products hit the market, Google wants to collect a lot of feedbacks from the developers to improve it first and to make a possible a smooth evolution for many wearable devices (why not, a sensor equipped jacket).

The challenge for the developers will be find the best integration between all these connected devices to create application with appeal for the users.

See more on Wall Street Journal

A nice set of Android icon for $25

The website AndroidIcons offers a set of 250 icons adapted for your Android applications. They come in 5 sizes, 14 colors and they are provided also in vector format and with a license.

It is possible to buy single icons as well: each one at the price of 1$. The website guarantees the quality of the resources and once you have bought them, you can use as many time as you want, no limit.

Some free stuff are also available: a set of boilerplates (12 colors and again 5 sizes) and some free icons to test.

"My Team Manager" available for testing

After some weekend nights spent working on it, I'm very happy to make "My Team Manager" application available for beta testing (only for Android users).

The application allows you to manage your soccer team and communicate with your players via SMS, email or Facebook. You can add the matches, the results, the scorers and the training sessions. 

You can share any news on your team's Facebook page!

The features of this version:

• Manage your roster and your players' info and statistics
• Add your team's matches, the calls-up, the lineup and your personal notes, the results, the scorers. Share them with your players via  the team Facebook page, sms or email
• Add and manage your training sessions
• Send any message via SMS, email or on your team's Facebook page

Download it from http://goo.gl/dP7wN 

Send me your feedbacks to improve and evolve the app. Enjoy and thanks for your support!

Manymo: test and share you android applications on different resolutions screens

Manymo is a cloud service that allows developers to launch their applications (or their mobile site) on an Android emulator embedded  in a web browser. It provides many different emulators and it is possible to choice among several resolution and several version of the OS.

You can easily embed the emulator on your website and you can also connect to it from your local computer to use the "dab" tool with the remote application.

Developers have only to upload their APKs and decide on which emulator they want to test their applications.
It would be useful to have the possibility to use the application simultaneously on many emulators: so far I haven't found this option. Besides that, having the possibility to keep the application data stored between a session and another will be appreciated.

Generally speaking, the utility is useful especially to test the look&feel of your activities (or mobile website) on different resolution and to embed the application on a website.

An Android photo camera from Nikon

The Nikon s800C is a photocamera based on Android. A normal camera in the front with a big touch screen in the back with the navigation buttons.

Some features:

• Optic zoom 12X
• Display: 3.5"
• Wifi
• Android 2.3
• GPS
• Web browser

There isn't a slot for the SIM card so the connectivity is possible only using the WIFI, The price has not been announced yet.

Otto library for the communication inside an Android application

When an Android application become complex, the communication between the different parts of your code become difficult and in this complexity the risk of introducing bugs grows.

A tiny library called Otto and developped by Jack Warthon, helps to simplify your code and to update easily different parts of your application following an event produced by an action.

In fact you might need to update the status of several acitvities after a change in the settings. A deep explication of the communication problem and the example using Otto are published on the Square blog while the library is downloadable from GitHub and there you will find also a complete tutorial

Browse your Android SQLLite database from Eclipse

I think this is very useful tool for any Android developers. Sometimes you need to check what you store in your application database or SharedPreferences. Ok, you can always write a good test for it, but in some case you just need a quick check to verify the integrity of your stored data or the structure of your tables.

Since a lot of Android developers uses Eclipse to implement their application, it would be great to have a tool inside our IDE to explore our application Database.

SQLite & XML Browser is the tool that allow that. You can download it clicking here

After that you have downloaded the plugin you can:

• Put the file in your Eclipse plugins folder (e.g. /usr/lib/eclipse/plugins)
• Restart Eclipse
• Start up an Android Emulator w/ Debugging in Eclipse
• Switch to the DDMS Perspective in Eclipse
• Go to the 'File Explorer' tab to locate your device's database file
• Navigate to: e.g. 'data -> data -> com.myapplicationpackage -> databases -> myapplication
• Click on the little Database icon at right top
• Switch to the 'Questoid SQLite Browser' tab that appears
• Switch to the 'Browse Data' sub tab
• Select your table from the drop down menu
• Browse data

 Here you are a video that show how it works:

Soccer Scores Pro: all the soccer scores on your phone

Soccer Score Pro is a free application that provide many informations about the most important soccer tournaments all around the world.
Live scores, notifications when the results change, matches' statistic data, league tables and schedules and rich news section.
A nice user interface completes this very good products.
The list of leagues includes:

• Premier League;
• Championship;
• Ligue 1;
• Ligue 2;
• Eredivisie;
• Serie A;
• Serie B;
• La Liga;
• MLS;
• Europa League;
• Champions League;
• Euro 2012;
• World cup;
• Mexican League;
• Scottish League;
• ....

The application is available for iPhone and Android 

 

A research unveils when we use mobile applications on Android

The results of a research done by the German firm DFKI (“Falling asleep with Angry Birds and Facebook and Kindle”) and presented at the Mobile HCI 2011 unveils which mobile applications are used and when.

The research has been done using AppSensor that is able to record which applications run, the time (start and stop) and the place in which they are used. The library has been installed on 4100 Android phones and the data have been collected in anonymous way.

In 4 months, around 22000 applications have been monitored with around 5 million of recorded sessions.

Some of the main achieved results:

• The average execution time is 71 seconds and the total time of usage of mobile applications is 1 hour per day;
• The "Alarm" application has a peak of executions between 6am and 8am: I would say that this is not a surprise at all!!!
• During the day the communication applications are the most used. The games win in the interval between 6am and 9am and around midnight. During the morning the news applications are the most popular;
• The social network applications seems to be used a lot at the end of the day: for example Facebook is used a lot between 8pm and 11pm with a peak around 10pm. Twitter has a constant usage with peaks around the lunch and dinner time. 

The new website to design super Android application

Image from http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

The Android Developer Website launch a new section very full of best practices and tips to build Android applications at the top level, not only in terms of features but also in terms of user interface. The website Android Design is well organized and any developer gets a very complete overview of what is good and what is not in terms of graphic interface.

It worths a lot a look at the suggestion to design and build the resources for your applications and how to build an application that supports both smartphone and tablet with the minimum effort!

Very nice the pages where a lot of best practices about how to communicate with the user are given. An award is deserved by the page where it is suggested a "Pure Android" (underlining the differences with iOS and Windows Phone)







A very good initiative by Google: Android training

Some days ago, Google launched its initiative to help developers to build better Android application. Designing effective navigation, battery life and audio playback to begin but many others classes will come in the coming months.

It is for sure a good way to create a strong link between the Android OS and the developers!

A Reto Maier presentation at Google I/O 2011

It worths a lot looking the video of the presentation that Reto Maier did at Google I/O 2011...

The link to his blog: here

Problem with HTC Desire and ADB driver? The solution is here.

If you try to connect your HTC Desire to your PC via USB having already installed the ADB driver for Android SDK, you will see that the driver is not working.

To fix the problem you need to install the USB driver coming with the HTC Sync (you can download here).

Thanks to James Giang for the tip.

Generate a tone with Android

It is pretty easy play a simple tone (a beep) using Android. Two lines of code are enough:

ToneGenerator toneGen = new ToneGenerator(AudioManager.STREAM_SYSTEM, 50);
toneGen.startTone(ToneGenerator.TONE_PROP_BEEP);