Weekly Report: Up to April 30

Progress:
- Whistle on Android is reported as one of the best app for natural disasters in Nikkei PC and Mobile ASCII, which both are very famous weekly magazine for Smart-phone users in Japan.
- Whistle on Android will be reported as the app you must install in a Japanese handbook for natural disasters, which is going to be published on May 14.
- Finished implementing Whistle Widget, but there are some bugs to be fixed.
-- Implementing Whistle App with Widget is not covered in Hello, Android book. So, I need another reference to do it.

Plan for next week:
- start writing reports.
-- I am planning to submit the report on May 10.

Weekly Report: Apr. 11 - 20

Progress from April 11 to 20:

- Developed Image-based word list for iPhone development practice with Titanium Studio.

- Participated in and gave a presentation at Monmouth College Science Symposium.

-- Discovered the problem that I need to check available screen size for Whistle App, because people who use an android phone with smaller screen size cannot download Whistle App due to different screen size. The cause would be the setting of android.manifest.xml file, so check it out and fix the problem.

This week plans:

- Finish implementing the rest of functions for Image-based wordlist and post it to App Store

- Update Whistle App version to 1.6 in which users can run the app as widget.

Weekly Report: Apr. 4 - Apr. 9

Because I found the cool product, Titanium, which can allow developers to develop Android/iPhone application with Javascript, not Java and Objective-c, and its IDE was published on April 10. I installed and tried to develop my own iPhone App.

It is incredibly so useful to develop Android/iPhone application that I can easily develop the following application for 2 days. I am thinking about bringing my development experience using Titanium to the poster session. For example, re-creating Whistle App with Titanium and add its code into my comparison.

The iPhone application above shows how my own iPhone app, image-based word list, works. It uses Flickr API and my own mashup API, which takes a word from URI and returns its usage example that includes the given word.

You can use my API by accessing the following URL.

http://www.twigraphy.org/eitango/usage-example-api.php

Sample Usage:

http://www.twigraphy.org/eitango/usage-example-api.php?word=sky
http://www.twigraphy.org/eitango/usage-example-api.php?word=book

Weekly Report: Mar. 28 - Apr. 1

Last Week Progress:
- Analyzed codes for Whistle on iPhone to compare code by code.

- Developed draft version of Whistle Widget on Android.

- Whistle on Android will be displayed at DoCoMo Smartphone Lounge, which is a private lounge of DoCoMo, the largest Japanese operator, dedicated to smart phones, from April 15 to May 31.
http://mobileinjapan.com/2010/08/05/theres-a-docomo-smartphone-lounge-for-that/

- Start thinking and developing my own simple iPhone app, eTango!.
Although I can access to the code and ask my friends about Whistle on iPhone, I have been thinking that developing an iPhone app by myself will deppen my understandings on iPhone much more. It would not be finished by the poster session, but it will be finished by this semester. So, I am planning to develop an iPhone app, eTango!, image-based word list for English learners in Japan.

What eTnago! does is:
The eTango! gives users English word, image of the word, and its usage examples, but intentionally does not give them definition of words and corresponding Japanese word. So, it forces users to memorize it mainly by image of the word, not by characters, because people are generally better at memorizing something as image, rather than as characters.

Weekly Report: Mar. 21 - 25

I was planning to visit you today, but because there were two projects due last week, I did not spend much time on comparing things between iPhone and Android apps. So, I will do it this week, and would like to visit you with them after the week, instead.

Other things:
- Achieved 20,000 downloads.
- O'reilly did a campaign for Japan's disaster that sells eBooks as half a price, so I bought a few books on Andoid and iPhone app development for other references.
- Whistle for iPhone was rejected by Apple for the following reason.

We've completed the review of your app, but cannot post this version to the App Store because it did not comply with the App Store Review Guidelines, as detailed below:

• 2.12: Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.

- We complained to the review with the fact that Whistle for Android has been downloaded by 20,000 people mainly in Japan for 3 weeks, and are still waiting for its reply.

Weekly Report: Mar. 15 - 19

In addition to the status posted on last Thursday, I did the following things last week:

- Updated Whistle on Android to ver. 1.5:
-- Automatically set the device's volume back when exiting.

- Implement Android Developer Tools, User Review Notifier:
-- Periodically check user reviews on your app, and send email to you if you get new comment.
-- Source: https://github.com/yasulab/user-review-notifier-for-android-market
# I have implemented this tool because it seems there are no ways to keep track of the reviews like RSS in Android Market.

- Whistle on iPhone is in review, so it will be published soon in App Store unless it is rejected.

- Achieved 10,000 downloads.

Latest Progress on Whistle App

I used Google Alert and Twitter Search to collect feedbacks from users, and try to understand what users want for the app. According to the feedbacks, some of users care about following points.

- 1. Want to make whistle sound louder than before.
- 2. Switching layout between portrait and landscape causes errors.
- 3. Want to automatically set the device's volume to max as soon as you start the app.

So, I updated the app's version to 1.4 that covers the whole concerns above.

Also, because the latest statistics feature on Android Market does not work properly now, I cannot get exact number how many users download the app. However, if number of users continue to increase with same speed so far, 1,500/day, the approximate number of downloads will be 10,000.

In addition, we created the promotional graphic and text for the app, and put them together into Android Market.

The text is written in Japanese because our main target of this app is Japanese people. The text says "Signaling SOS Instead of You".

For iPhone's ver.,  it is still waiting for the review from Apple.