Minor New City Catechism widget patch

January 25, 2016January 26, 2016 ampers Leave a comment

Hopefully I now have got the hang of Android widgets. I noticed that after the new update the questions weren’t moving:

https://twitter.com/ampers_apps/status/690438087609077760

I first thought the date calculation was off by one week, but as I dug into it it seemed that it wouldn’t go back to the correct position if you opened up the answer for that question. I have also tweaked the widget code a bit making it a few lines shorter here and there. Hopefully it means it is more robust

The widget should now work as planned. If you do go forward or back and open up that answer, you should be able to leave it there and the next time the widget updates it will take you back to the week/question you should be on.

Fingers crossed.

New City Catechism date patch

January 17, 2016 ampers Leave a comment

I must admit that I am a bit slack with checking in with the New City Catechism every week. But for this year I am going to try and check out each question per week (as it is intended). However, for awhile I have noticed that the widget would always default back to question one, and since the beginning of this year the actual app seemed to be having trouble working out what question it should be displaying.

I’m on the cusp of releasing a new app and I generally only like working on one app at a time, but the date not changing correctly finally annoyed me so much that I sat down last night to fix it. This is the second patch I have tried for the widget, so fingers cross this one will work.

I have just push the new update to the Play Store and if you can’t wait for that to update you can download the APK from the portfolio page.

2015 in Review

January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 ampers Leave a comment

As I did for 2014, I thought I should post on what I achieved in 2015. Last year seemed to be the year of the update with no new apps released. I don’t feel that bad as some of the updates were as big as whole apps. Also two of my apps crossed over the 10,000 downloads mark.

I am working on a new app that should be out by the end of the month (hopefully!), stay tuned…

I also just started a new twitter account, @ampers_apps which will hopefully give more updates about what I am up to for 2016. Feel free to follow that.

Anyway, below is a quick rundown of how my apps went this year.

321
A simple gospel presentation by Glen Scrivener
Sep 16 (1.2.0): Added in 9 more languages
Total installs for 2015: 357

Australian Daily Prayer
Displays the 1995 Australian Anglican Prayer Book morning and evening services and uses the 2005 Weekday Lectionary.
Dec 11 (2.0.0): Whole new interface rewrite, now in Material Design.
Total installs for 2015: 315

Communicate Jesus
Displays content from the Communicate Jesus blog run by Steve Kryger
Oct 15 (2.0.0): Updated interface to Material Design
Total installs for 2015: 81

Mobile Multiply
Simple discipleship program written by Francis Chan
Apr 15 (2.5.0): Added Spanish translation
Total installs for 2015: 6,400

New City Catechism
A modern weekly catechism written by Tim Keller
3rd Feb (4.0.1): Added in Spanish introduction
2nd Jun (4.1.0): Added in a home screen widget
23rd Jun (4.1.1): Tried to fix a widget bug
Total installs for 2015: 5,688

OpenSpritz Bible
Allows you to quickly read the Bible without moving your eyes.
Total installs for 2015: 453

Two Ways To Live
Simple gospel presentation by Matthias Media
Total installs for 2015: 3,247

Who Will Be King?
Children’s version of Two Ways To Live by Matthias Media
Total installs for 2015: 117

I also added a websites portfolio to this site to showcase a bit more than the android apps that I make. In 2015 I updated this site, Canberra Christian Conventions and Body@Work Physio websites. I don’t really have the stats for all three of those to say how much exposure they all got.

For a general overview of how my apps are going, here is how they stood on the 1st of January 2016. From the table below it seems that there are nearly 22,100 ampers apps currently installed on android devices*. Comparing the below table with one from October 2014 (Total: 14,423/19,499) , you can see that the retention rate has dropped to 57% from 74%, but overall numbers has increased (as you should expect) and most apps have doubled in total installs.

* Current installs does not including the direct downloads from this site, and it does not include inactive devices. This means someone may have installed one of my apps and then bought a new phone and just threw the old phone out without uninstalling it.