I created my FlashLight app as a way of learning some basic Android development. With thousands of flashlight/torch apps on the market, I didn't want it to be just another of the same. Rather than focusing solely on producing the most amount of light, I decided to concentrate on "just enough" light.
There are tons of situations where you need just a little bit of light. Navigating a bedroom where others sleep, checking on a sleeping baby, reading something without ruining your night vision, etc. I wanted a tool that was more than just blinding light, and useful in these situations.
FlashLight controls brightness in two ways. One, by drawing a colored circle to the screen. And two, by changing the screen's brightness. Both of these are adjusted through one fluid gesture. Swipe up the screen for a larger circle and more light. Swipe down the screen for a smaller circle and less light
Color, is another important feature. While white light gives you the best range of brightness, red light helps you see at night. Blue-green, offers the best dark adaptation recovery. Also, photographers often paint with light in night photos. To address this, I added a color picker that spans the entire color gamut a screen can produce.
Lastly, in situations where the most amount of light is needed, the ability to turn on the camera flash was added. I didn't want to clutter the screen with more buttons. I settled on a double-tap gesture to toggle between screen light and camera flash.
The need for a flashlight app has been reduced with additions made to Android OS. Still, I find an almost daily need for FlashLight's screen light features.
After creating the FlashLight app, I wanted to make something heavily themed. One of the alarm sounds in Android at the time was a corny rooster crow. The sound birthed the idea of a rooster/farm themed timer app.
The theme is based off the quintessential american farm. A red wood barn, brown picket fence, chicken eggs, and (of course) the rooster. Chicken clucks and short crows are also incorporated.
A timer is a short term need. Long term needs are solved with alarms. So, I focused on providing the simplest interface for sub four hour timer needs. Things like taking a nap (1 hour), boiling an egg (10 minutes), or brewing coffee in a press pot (4 minutes).
To reduce buttons, I settled on: one hour, ten minutes, one minute, and ten seconds. Entering time required less cognitive load, and created a theme appropriate pecking gesture.
There's no undo/delete button. If a person enters a wrong time, their only option is to clear it, and start again. To eleviate mistakes, I added audial and haptic feedback to every button press. With four of five senses being used, I found I didn't miss often, and flow was retained.
Rooster's utility has largely been replaced with additions to the Android OS. But, it remains in my heart as a fun and helpful learning experience.
Mic List is a personal app, not yet released.
There are a lot of list/task apps available. Everynote, OneNote, Google Keep to name a few. All of these apps force you to tediously peck out items on the software keyboard. With Mic List, I focused on speed and simplicity of entering items.
Most list itemss I generate are short (less than 5 words per item). Things like: wash car, clean fridge, take out trash, etc. If it's a grocery list, they're even shorter: bananas, milk, bread. I wanted a way of creating these kinds of lists as fast as possible. I did that, with dictation.
Items are entered by pressing a mic button, and saying what you want to add. A pause in speech will add the item to your list, then imediately listen for your next item. Speech-to-text isn't perfect, and there are times it doesn't enter what you're saying correctly. That said, I found it was faster/easier to say the item again until I got it right. After, I could go back and quickly remove the incorrect entries.
While I use this app several times a week, and with great utility, I feel it's not yet ready for market. I'm continueing development until then.
I play a lot of boardgames with my friends, and often find things missing from the games. Whether it's a decent way to track score, or a better mechanic for choosing who goes first. GeeGee Gamekit was created to fill those gaps.
I built the app using straight HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This allowed me to bring the app both to the web, and Android with a single code base. It also allowed me to experiment and learn the capabilities of WebView.
I made the app responsive, by hiding delete functions (in scoreboard and dice roller) behind a swipe gesture on smaller screens. Imagery also scales to screen size (in spinner and timer) to offer the best visibility.
After finishing development on my updated device, I tested my app on older versions of Android. I found that many of the modern (but widely supported) web styles and properties weren't available in WebView until Android 5.0. Unfortunately, I had to target my app for this tiny segment.
I'm still working on legacy support