Hacker for Hire

Today I’m releasing my “first” android application into the store. I say first because it’s not the first I’ve written, but it’s the first one that I’ve actually decided might actually be slightly beneficial to someone else so I put it into the store. When the app goes live, I’ll add a link and all that other fun stuff. In the mean time, you can check out details about what the app can / can’t do and the things I learned along the way here.

UPDATE1:

The link is live: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.hackerforhire.msbandlight

Things I Learned While Building This Application

• The MS Band Preview is nice, but there is no way to communicate back to the phone from the band, this severrly limits things like using the band as a remote shutter or requesting unique codes from two-factor authentication tools that exist on the phone / tablet devices
• The preview SDK does not allow you to set custom backgrounds or images for background on custom tiles, this needs to be changed since things like the Starbucks app are allowed to do it and they are “third party like”
• Details about the batter or battery power left on the device are something that is reported back in the connection information but are not accessible from the SDK in any useful fashion preventing you from determining the battery level
• The character set supported by the band is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc305145.aspx and does not support the characters required to add repeating text such as  ██████████ that would put more white on the screen (the ‘@’ sign appears to take the most pixels in my testing)
• The SDK provides no means for me to tell the BandTile object how many seconds it should display on the screen
• Android API for Lollipop is breaking lots of things with the “Implicit Intent” … I don’t know why because it doesn’t seem to be documented well anywhere
• Proguard isn’t enabled by default (not that I really care for an app like this) so that might be one of the first things to look at turning on in the future
• It seems weird to me that the build.gradle file is the “right” place to put the version information over the AndroidManifest.xml
• Think about doing screen shots, and iconography before you start going down the “hey I should try to build a release path
• This is AMAZING … the site helps you take your basic iconography and make it actually useful inside of the app/res: http://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/icons-launcher.html so many kudos to you random internet developer
• There’s an awesome sub-reddit with lots of people who have hopes and dreams for the SDK: http://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftBand