Market Fluctuations

Today Google announced that developers from more countries can sign up for Google Checkout Merchant accounts to sell apps on the Android Market. This is exciting as I have thus far been entertaining alternative methods of monetization such as advertising, referrals and donations.

This also raises new questions such as whether or not to have a free "demo" version of apps, a free ad supported version and what features from the pay version should be present in the free versions.

TWiT v0.65 Released

Just uploaded an updated version to correct the NullPointerException that had caused the previously discussed crash report.

Work on "Plan A" to allow playback of the video stream continues but is not at a testable stage yet. Hopefully the weekend will allow the start of some testing of video playback.

First Crash Report!

A feature of the Android Market that I didn't know about prior to publishing the TWiT app is that it collects crash reports! I got my first report, a NullPointerException, that occurred when the user pressed the stop button without having previously pressed the start button. An assumption on my part that I had overlooked. I love the Android Platform!

It should go without saying that this bug will be corrected in the next release. In fact that piece of code had already gone under quite a lot of changes.

TWiT v0.6 Released

After a couple of weeks of part time development I released the TWiT app as it currently exists on Aug 30th. It's able to stream the audio feed as a service, participate in the IRC chat and display the show calendar with the appropriate timezone of the phone. The app can not currently play the video stream but I have some ideas on how to proceed with that, I hope that I don't have to port FFmpeg w/ x264 to do it as that would force me to release TWiT under the GPL.