I've been judging applications for the Android Developer Challenge 2 for several days now, and had not yet seen my own entry, Screebl.  I was beginning to think that perhaps Google's judging application was smart enough to filter apps from being delivered to their authors.  Either that, or Google hadn't accepted the application for some reason. 

Last night, however I finally stumbled across Screebl.  Of course I had a hard time installing it (the ADC2 judging app is a bit flaky to say the least).  It was surprisingly exciting to see it download and install.  Let me know if you see it, and remember to vote early and vote often!

In my push to get Screebl out to the masses, I decided last week to make an attempt to localize the application.  I discussed this with several people, and one person offered a quick solution to the problem of translating the English messages of Screebl to other languages:

"If I were you, I would just use Google Translate.  That should work well enough."

Despite all of my posturing and preaching recently about the need for Android application developers to be more careful about polishing their apps, I foolishly took that advice and translated Screebl to German and French using Google Translate.  Trust me, this still wasn't an easy task for me, but in the end I thought things had gone OK...

I recently published a blog entry about lessons that I've learned during the course of creating Screebl, my entry in the Android Developer Challenge 2.  In my previous post, I mentioned that one of the top three things that I'd learned was "Polish is better than feature".   My claim is that the majority of the applications that are available for Android right now lack polish, and consequently it is difficult to gain traction with users evaluating mobile applications.

In the interest of improving the Android platform, I'm going to be writing a series of articles that describe things that I think I've done well in Screebl, and I'm also going to contribute the code behind those features for others to use if they wish.  I'm hoping that others in the development community will follow suit.  It would be great if we had a market (as I mentioned here) specifically for delivering packaged widgets to other devs, but I'm not aware of anything at the moment, so I'll use this venue for now.

I just recently finished my push to get a small application called Screebl ready for the Android Developer Challenge 2.  In retrospect, it was a good exercise to go through for a number of reasons.  Here's a list of the top three things that I learned (or relearned) from ADC2... 

A free version of the innovative Android-based application that uses orientation data to control device suspension made its debut on the Android Marketplace today.  The application is fully functional, and offers a large number of configuration options.