Anthony Tietjen

Yesterday I decided I wanted to get at least something out on the Android Market. So I put together a very very simple app called Shopping Assistant. Currently its only function is to help you figure out cost per ounce while you are out shopping. This is helpful for knowing if something is really a good deal or not. Shopping Assistant is a simple app, but in the first day there were 15 downloads. The app is currently free. Perhaps someday I will add more features. The ADT Plugin for  Eclipse made it very easy to export the app, sign it and get it ready for upload to the Android Market . I used the Dalvic Debug Monitor to take the screenshots. You can find Shopping Assistant in the Android Market.

I noticed that the apps I was making using App Inventor for Android were ending up being about 4MB in file size. So I decided to find out what size an app is when you use the Android SDK instead. It turns out that there is a considerable difference. A simple Hello World app made using the SDK is only 20KB, whereas one made using App Inventor for Android is 3.55 Mb. I also found out that the startup time for the two Hello World apps differed. On my phone, the app made using the SDK opened maybe 1 1/2 seconds faster than the one made using App Inventor for Android. See below for more details. Made with Android SDK File size: 20.00KB Startup: Maybe less than a second Made with App Inventor for Android File size: 3.55MB Startup: About 2 seconds

TinyWebDB is a component in App Inventor for Android that lets your app communicate with a web page in order to set or retrieve values, rather than storing them on the phone itself. I wanted to know what the TinyWebDB component sends to the web page when it tries to set or retrieve values, so I used Kodingen this morning to write a PHP script that takes the form fields and values sent to the page and writes them to a file. Here is what I found: TinyWebDB.StoreValue sends these parameters: tag value TinyWebDB. GetValue sends this parameter: tag So if you write your own PHP page for TinyWebDB to connect to, you can know if TinyWebDB is trying to store a value if the "value" key exists in the $_POST array. If the "value" key doesn't exist in the $_POST array then you know that TinyWebDB is only trying to retrieve the value for the given tag. As an alternative to using the method outlined by Google , you could use TinyWebDB with your own script written in an...