App-a-palooza

Over the weekend we had dinner at the home of some friends and I got to talking with Chris, the male host not myself, and he had some ideas for a smart phone App. One was a flashlight app, the other was a Starbucks locator app and unfortunately I had to burst his bubble on both counts. I had a few flashlight apps already installed and there were 4 Starbucks locator apps in the Android Market. He did have another good idea, being able to detect a certain liquid or solid substance by putting the phone in close proximity, but that's way beyond my comprehension at this point in time.

Yesterday I was using my flashlight app on my phone to look into my cat Stinky's ear while Marla was putting his ear drops in. There are two LED flash lights on the camera, the top one stays on fine, the second one started to blink after about 15 seconds. I checked online and found 2 similar cases where the person brought their phone in to Verizon and got a replacement due to a hardware issue with the LED. Bummer, but honestly the only time that would be an issue is if you are using the flashlight app for a while or recording an extended video where you need to have the light on continuously. I'm not in a hurry to bring it in, since I could either cover the bottom light with a piece of black tape first or just ignore the issue for now, but I will bring it in prior to the one year warranty being up.

Then I read this article about a 14 year old that created the iPhone app 'Bubble Ball' which is the most popular free iPhone app out there. One of the main points of the article is that there are lots of tools out there to make the job of creating an app much easier. As the article says..."The gist, proponents say, is that apps now can be developed by anyone -- just like Blogger and Tumblr let anyone author a blog..."

Sooo, after these 3 recent events and since I figured out how to get this blog thing going, with a little help of course, I figure I should be able to create a basic app. I have a background in computers and when the internet first came around I used notepad to code HTML to create some basic webpages. So that is what I'm setting out to do. I want to try and create a flashlight application that only activates one LED flash at a time, specifically the top one. In that way I could still use the flashlight feature, without having to have the second LED blink.

I'm hoping that is possible, since I can't see why you wouldn't be able to control each flash LED light independently, but will see what I find out. The 14 year old used a free Apple application called Corona, which isn't an option for me since I don't have a Mac. Google has their own free application creator app called App Inventor. I have no idea what kind of undertaking I'm embarking on, but should find out soon enough. Wish me luck!

Has anyone thought about trying to come up with their own application? Any tips or tricks to offer up? Why not try your hand at it too and see what you can come up with and we can compare notes. It can't hurt to try!

Posted in: blogging , Smartphone