snctlnSoftware

Device Seeding Yay!

So I received my free Nexus One from Google 2 days ago.  I received this as part of their Device Seeding Program for Top Android Market Developers, unfortunately I already have a Nexus one that I enjoy very much.  So I figured I would try and sell this new Nexus One on eBay, I have never sold anything on eBay before.  I used to buy random computer components on eBay about 5 years ago or so when I was in college, but I just have had no interest in it, until now.  So I listed the phone and it sold via buy it now… to a Nigerian scammer, /sigh.  Oh well, at least I could figure the whole thing out before I even considered sending them the phone.  So I tried my luck and listed it again and had success.  Now I am trying to decide what to do with the proceeds… The majority of negative comments I receive are from Droid owners, The Motorola Droid that runs on Verizon here in the US.  The Droid does have a unique screen resolution and it might be the most popular Android device, I don’t know any numbers to back that up but in my opinion it is the only Android phone that has had a decent marketing campaign (have you seen the latest Luke Wilson AT&T ads?   eck, seriously a month ago his ads were ripping on Verizon phones because “all of my cool apps are gone” and now this guy showing how “awesome” an Android  device can be while playing basketball, don’t make no sense to me…).

Well anyways my current dilemma:

Do I suck it up and buy a Droid even though I have no intention of ever using it as a phone?  It is CDMA and I highly doubt I will pay another Early Termination Fee this year to go to a carrier with higher prices than what I have now (and if I were to change carriers it would be to go back to Sprint for the oh so nice looking HTC EVO 4G and very nice and affordable rates)

OR

Do I buy a Milestone (GSM Droid that I can put my simcard in and actually use as a phone) and be content that I now have a device with the screen size I need to test, but the actual hardware and configuration is different than that of the actual users that are leaving feedback.

Yesterday I was convinced I should buy a Milestone, but now I am kind of leaning towards the droid.  I doubt I woulg want to replace my Nexus One with the Milestone as my daily use phone anyways, but it might be nice to have that option (even if there is no US T-Mobile 3G support).

Well besides all of the fun with devices I also managed to finally find the time to update WordWrench Lite.  The Lite version has had the same 20 puzzles in it for the past 10 months and the commenters were starting to revolt.  I have added Google Adsense ads into WordWrench Lite and put 50 new puzzles in the game.  So now the free version plays for more than twice as long .

Also I updated BreakTheBlocks Lite and Full and WordWrench Lite and Full to include a “Splash Screen” on startup.  Thanks to a blog post by Fred Gott I was reminded that I have been meaning to do something about the 1-4 second black screen that users see when starting my games.  So a little bit of Inkscape and GIMP work and now I have some splash screens.

In my res/values directory I added a themes.xml files that contains the following

<resources>
<style name=”Theme.SplashScreen” parent=”android:Theme”>
<item name=”android:windowNoTitle”>true</item>
<item name=”android:windowBackground”>@drawable/splash_screen</item>
<item name=”android:layout_width”>fill_parent</item>
<item name=”android:layout_height”>fill_parent</item>
</style>
</resources>

I of course added a 320×480 png image name splash_screen.png to my res/drawable fodler.

And the last part was to add

android:theme=”@style/Theme.SplashScreen”

to the activity node in my Manifest, and that was all it took.  Now when starting these 2 games users are presented with a graphic that is displayed until the Activiy finishes initializing and actually draws to the screen.