Don't forget about DAAP

I recently updated some of the Android applications my brother and I have on the market. I left out by far the most popular application that we have. I have now fixed that. The DAAP application last night received a small but very useful bug fix. I expect more features to come out for the application in due time.

The bug fixed was a user experience (UX) design bug. Take the following scenario for instance: Select a song to play. Upon selection, the notification appears and you are free to continue using your phone for other purposes. Suppose that then you decided to return to the home screen or another application via repeatedly pressing the back button on the phone. You can use your phone, but if you returned to the DAAP application, you would have to re-login. If you clicked the notification, there was no way to return to the song selection screen. Essentially there was no way to return to pick a new song without re-logging in, a time consuming process.

The fix was easy. I added a new menu option on the media player (the screen viewed after clicking the notification) that allows you to return to the playlists. To prevent overloading of the menu options, I moved the shuffle and repeat buttons onto the screen. They are viewable at all times now. A screenshot below is included for demonstration purposes.


You can download DAAP via the android market by
  1. The Android Market Application
  2. Scanning the tag

Updates to mOTP and Utlimate Search Widget

I have finally found some free time to fix things that have been bothering me in my Android applications. That means updates!

First, I have fixed a minor bug in the mOTP application affecting some users. The bug was a simple oversight when originally implementing profile editing. When editing TOTP profiles with a non-default time interval, the time interval would  be listed as default. The fix was simple: pre-populate the spinner similar to how the other fields operate.

The second update was much more demanding. The Ultimate Search Widget application had no support for custom search providers. For instance, if I wanted to search my blog using the widget, I could not. I was restricted to a predefined list of search providers. Also, if I constantly switched between providers, I would have to scroll through the huge list of providers to find the search provider I wanted.

I solved the first problem by adding support for custom search providers. Simply fill in the name of the provider, the URL portion that appears before the query, the URL portion that appears after the query, and you are set.


Now this newly created search provider will appear in the list of providers when clicking the icon on the left hand side of the widget!

To fix the second problem, I added a preference type screen where you may click which providers are to appear in the list. This allows you to remove unused providers and make the widget more useful when frequently switching between search providers.


You can find both of the newly updated applications in The Android Market: