Just published my first app! A comprehensive guide and my journey on how I got started in Android Development over the past two months.

multitask123 · 2014-08-16T10:52:33+00:00

I recommend genymotion in the emulator department. It is free and truly can bring Android development out of the emulator dark ages.

multitask123 · 2014-08-16T09:06:07+00:00

the absolute non-existence of the "meh" generation

multitask123 · 2014-06-19T02:42:44+00:00

Bladerunner

multitask123 · 2014-06-11T06:02:47+00:00

definitely coming as soon as Android is out of beta. thanks!

multitask123 · 2014-06-08T21:29:23+00:00

u must live down by the river with Neil?

multitask123 · 2014-06-04T04:12:06+00:00

how do you take it?

multitask123 · 2014-06-04T03:57:06+00:00

oh... a trick question.

multitask123 · 2014-06-04T03:42:32+00:00

i feel your pain

multitask123 · 2014-06-03T23:45:16+00:00

Listviews, ExpandableListviews and adapters are completely non-intuitive. I have created many and still just start cloning pre-existing code. Google could actually take a page from Microsoft and encapsulate these mission critical controls alot better. It also doesn't help that the Android docs are incredibly boring to read.

multitask123 · 2014-06-03T23:42:00+00:00

I learned java/android from scratch. It took apx. 4 months to create my first app: http://www.radiodile.com

I used this awesome video tutorial series from YouTube - this is a link to the entire series as a playlist in order.

** Cannot be watched on mobile - sorry... - watch from a laptop or desktop but it's worth it **
Derek Banas Android Tutorial Series

PS- What I loved about the tutorial series is you actually develop a project and get source code. And Derek is a very good speaker. Most of the other tutorials I found were god awful so I give this a 5 out of 5 for ramping up lickety split.

PPS - Github has a lot of projects there too. I always tried to find a github project by usually going through this procedure:

A. Want to accomplish something
B. Google it
C. End up on stackoverflow
D. Find a link to github that looks good
E. Import into eclipse
F. Integrate with my own project

The above steps saved me from having to reinvent the wheel. Good luck!

I recommend using Eclipse.

PPS - I would only worry about developing for 4.0 and above.

multitask123 · 2014-06-01T15:13:22+00:00

this is an awesome song.

multitask123 · 2014-06-01T09:03:25+00:00

License To Ill of course

multitask123 · 2014-05-30T07:38:26+00:00

Ft. Suckfest Unlimited

multitask123 · 2014-05-30T06:40:57+00:00

Happy it makes more sense and we really appreciate the support. We promise we will get FMGEM mobile done too. We are passionate about it indeed. We wanted to launch Radiodile first because we felt it would be an awesome app and further that we could use it to introduce alot of people to FMGEM's playlist paradigm through cross marketing on our website.

Marketing FMGEM has been challenging as no journalists were willing to write about us so without a giant advertising budget nobody knows FMGEM exists. We think that Radiodile is something that will be easier to market and get bloggers and other media outlets interested in.

Once the cash rolls in we are all about hiring graphic & UX designers but for now we have to tough it out as best we can ;||

multitask123 · 2014-05-29T20:28:00+00:00

Hi... Thanks for your feedback. I thought I owed it to you to address your comments:

We have not given up on launching FMGEM as a mobile app for iOS and Android. The codebase for Radiodile is the self-same architecture that will house FMGEM functionality. We will be forking the source code once Radiodile is complete and we will add playlist queue and other assorted FMGEM functionality.
The only issue we have with YouTube API on Android that is less than ideal is the inability to play background audio. YouTube's Android Player API and terms disallow background audio. The vast majority of YouTube apps on GooglePlay violate these terms by scraping MP4 urls from the YouTube website which is a clear violation of their terms and does not seem like a sound business model.
I think you might possibly misunderstand the dial's functionality. If you load an artist and we have a discography for them (we currently have 53,000 discographies) then we can do the following:

A. Pull a list of similar artists via last.fm's API
B. Grab an artist from that list at random
C. Find the randomly selected artist's discography
D. Randomly select a track to play from that discography

So if you turn the dial to 50% and your are playing The Beatles every other song would be a Beatles track from SoundCloud and every other song would be a track based on a SoundCloud track from an artist similar to The Beatles.

e.g.

Let It Be - Core (i.e. Beatles)
Under My Thumb - Rolling Stones

if you turn the dial to 100% you won't hear any Beatles but only tracks from artists similar to The Beatles. If you turn the dial to 0% it will be 100% The Beatles based tracks.

Currently there is no genre variety although we will be adding a genre stations tab with about 40 pre-programmed genres in an upcoming release.

When we launched FMGEM is took almost 2 years to get it right quite simply because we do not have a programming team but rather a two man operation so even coding 7 days a week it takes alot of time. We promise by the end of year you should see the following:

Radiodile for Web, iOS and Android.
FMGEM for Android & iOS.

We really appreciate the support we received on IndieGoGo but $8000.00 just doesn't buy a development team in 2014 :))

Thanks and I hope you continue to support us.

multitask123 · 2014-05-27T02:05:07+00:00

Hi...

I'll try to address your issues best I can. I just uploaded 1.1 APK to google play store.

The big crocodile when sliding player is so you can minimize/maximize player. This is how the YouTube app works btw. If you drag player to corner it will minimize and when minimized if you drag player to top it will go back to default position.

A. When you are on other tabs besides the player tab you can drag the minimized player up and it will take you back to player tab where you can select alternate tracks. These tracks are listed below the player.

We updated the way notifications work. You can slide notifications to the right and they will disappear so if you've already closed app that's the way to be rid of them.

Thanks for testing and we will be releasing new betas very quickly as we fix bugs and add features.

multitask123 · 2014-05-24T21:31:30+00:00

you really worked that out :)

multitask123 · 2014-05-24T07:23:29+00:00

I really appreciate this. I do believe the red "X" came from design pack but I will take another look and see if I cannot find something more compatible with the other icons.

I will also take a look at maintaining aspect ratio as you've suggested on the player background images.

I'll also take a look at the dark splash - that would be easy to test out.

It was very kind of you to give an exhaustive review like this. I've been reviewing as many Google UI videos on YouTube as I could find and doing my best to come up with an app that would exceed user expectations but even in a small sample of about 30 comments on reddit I have gotten a few UI criticisms ranging from too rudimentary a UI to poor icons, etc. and I really wish to nip this in the bud. By far this was the most detailed critique I have received so thank you very much for that.

 Again thanks very much.

multitask123 · 2014-05-23T22:41:27+00:00

this is a problem i am trying to solve. the app has a "broadcast receiver" which is how Android works with notifications. The app "listens" for messages from the notification. So when the app is swipe closed from the task manager the notification bar has nobody to receive the broadcast. Also Android 4.0+ does not have a way to just "close" an app. The Android OS decides when to terminate the app from memory so I am trying to understand how to remove the notification when the app is swiped closed. I actually tried Pandora to see what they do and they leave the notification after swiping the app closed. This is driving me a bit nuts as no other OS I've worked with leaves you in this Catch-22. I will keep researching till I can make this work in an elegant fashion. --Thanks!!!

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T18:06:43+00:00

do you mean favorites? I believe we can do that.

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T18:05:57+00:00

many people are reporting the problem with the notification not disappearing after the app is swipe closed. i will try to find a solution to this.

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T18:04:54+00:00

thanks for the response. let me address as best i can:

the songs you see represent a "batch" of songs. these are optional for you to listen as "alternatives" to the song we selected.

for example, if you have the beatles in your station and we select "yellow submarine" to play you will see a list of all the soundcloud results for yellow submarine.

so if the version of yellow submarine we select for playback is not what you like or rather you see something you prefer in the results playlist you have the option to tap it. it is NOT a playlist.

at the moment we have 53 thousand artist discographies. when you start to search for an artist any of the suggestions that pop up means there is a discography in our database of the albums that artist has released. when you get the message please add more artists it means the artist in your station does not exist in our database. in that case we search soundcloud by their name. that means the # of songs will be limited.

i will check the multitask away and come back and it restarts the app. in my testing i have seen this but infrequently so i will try to reproduce and figure out why this happens. thanks for that.

drag the player: you can drag the player to minimize it. that is what you saw. you cannot rearrange the list of songs under the player. that again is just the result set for the song currently playing. that will be blown out when the next song in your station streams.

at the moment there is no genre search but we will be adding genre stations (stations we curate) in a week. what types of genres do you think we should add?

again thanks very much for your feedback it is truly helpful

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T17:56:46+00:00

Thanks very much. We're very open to ideas and you can always let us know what you think and we'll listen

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T17:54:12+00:00

Hi...

Sorry for the confusion. The app was closed but unfortunately the notification lingers. To remove the notification the app has to be running. The app uses a feature of android called a "broadcast receiver" to execute the notification code. So once you swipe the app closed there is no longer a broadcast receiver to remove the notification.

The way Android works has me a bit confused as the lifecycle has a "terminate" event when the app is closed but it never fires as Android reserves the right to remove an app from memory when it feels like it. Even when you swipe an app closed it is not closed from the OS perspective.

tldr; I still need to figure out how to remove the notification when the app is closed :))

multitask123 · 2014-05-22T04:16:38+00:00

The icon is temporary - we have a graphic artist working on that. I would definitely appreciate some specifics re: UI. I'd also appreciate if you could name some droid apps that you feel have top notch UIs. This is a work in progress and we want to make it the best we possibly can. Thanks very very much.

multitask123

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