Seemingly, at least when looking at my blog, I have been enjoying the fruits of life lately, and stopped coding! However this couldn’t be further from the truth…

Over the summer I was commissioned by AWR, an international Christian radio station, to create an Android version of their iPhone app. A schedule app with RSS playlist creation capabilities. The app is now in beta testing and will, hopefully, soon be released.

It has been an interesting experience, as it is a more “traditional” app than my games development. It involves download of the schedule from a background server, and then several different search options based on language, time of airplay and geographical target. The geographical target search was, by far, the most time intensive to develop. It involves a scrollable map which the user can click and get a list of programs from the corresponding CIRAF region. In the end I decided to implement it by having an invisible coloured map in the background – one colour for each CIRAF area – and when the foreground map is clicked check the colour of the invisible background map at the click point, and find the CIRAF region based on the colour. Most time was spent on colouring the map, which was a tedious nitty-gritty job. Apart from that development hasn’t faced me with any real problems, and I look forward to following the download rates, but have to wait an see what bugs the testing will throw at me…