android development crusade special (part 19): a game in the weekend challenge.

Note: This is just bunch of notes for myself to keep track of how my hobby  projects develop over time.


Great  news:

1. Doms learns Chinese hit a next milestone .10000 downloads.
2. Doms diagnostic tools  hit a next milestone ( 10000 downloads.) soon too.
3. Doms countries capitals flags quiz game  hit a next milestone ( 5000 downloads.)
4. Doms learns chinese has more downloads than  Doms diagnostic tools !!!

Development news and stas:

Recently I learnt 2 new things:

• Start activity for result, which doesn't work as well as I expected.
• Background animation during move between activities,which add smoothness to my apps.

Nothing excited happen in my learning apart of ...  I discover a new type of Exception called  ConcurrentModificationException and solution how solved can be found here: http://pastorcmentarny.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/how-to-solve-problem-with.html

Sources:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#StartingActivities
http://www.mysamplecode.com/2013/02/android-animation-switching-activity.html



Doms diagnostic tools


Doms diagnostic tools development going terrible slowly and it seems v2.0 release will be badly delayed.(It was plan to release around 4.4) I feel bit scared to release a new version as old one is quite stable at the moment,despite some minor bugs.


I had many features idea for my app,but to be honest  I have only a 3 big features left to do . WiFi Direct,NFC and  USB.

• WiFi Direct is easiest to do and I am half way done.
• USB is difficult due lack of accessory that i can plug-in and test on :/.
• NFC is most difficult and i will abandon this feature.

I have other little things to do like:

• I need as well update GUI to looks reasonable on Android 4.0 and above,which is boring and time consuming thing to do.
• I fixed quite few bugs,but I have still few features that require improvements.

but I lost excitement to continue development of this app.However i do a little bits from time to time as it is my first app and it has special meaning for me.

Stats:
Search for: "diagnostic tools: is on 6th place on page1 !

 You can download from here: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dms.pastor.diagnostictools

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Dom learns Chinese  Game


Progress going well.I do not spent to much time on learning Chinese at the moment,but i keep playing from time to time and i enjoy it.I enjoy my own game.I have many ideas for new features.
I do not plan release a minor update (that's include new words, lesson and bug fixes only,but i am in the middle of next major release where I will add last button where i will collect bunch of tips for travel , learning and other misc features. I need to improve adventure mode as i see some minor balance issues regards ... penalty for mistakes and do few tweaks here and there

Stats:
Search:  for "learn chinese"  is on page 2 [+3]!
Search:  for "learn chinese free" is on page 2  [ +3]!
Search:  for "learn chinese game" is on page 1 (2nd place! (+9)  ) !
Search:  for "learn chinese free game"  is on page 1 (1st place!)
Search:  for "chinese game" is on page 1[ +1! ] (18th place)

 You can download from here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dms.pastor.chinesegame

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Doms Countries Capitals Flag Quiz Game



Experimental project to help me understand, how words in description are important for better search result.


So far download rate drop badly after  my recent changes I added my ugly Feature Graphic .I 'improved' my description.
Result I lost around 33% downloads .
Some observations:
I think, my problem with description is that I try to cover too many 'key' keywords (which is country,capital,flag,quiz,game,trivia,of the world). It seems  I need narrow my most important keywords. .I will do more changes to see how they affect download rate
It seems best result i have for around 3000 characters description.
It seems my current description target to many cases
It seems suggestion of using only lowercase characters has impact on result.

Stats:

 Search for "quiz game"  is on page 19 :(
 Search for " country of the world" is on page 5 :(
 Search for " countries of the world" is on page 2 :)
 Search for " capital of the world "  is on page 3 :/
 Search for " capitals of the world "  is on page page 2 :)
 Search for " flag of the world "  is on page 8 :((
 Search for " flags of the world "  is on page 6 :(


 You can download from here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dms.pastor.cccfQuizGame

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My RPG project(s)

I work on simplified battle system for my game at the moment and this is an intense development.