Pete's Development Stuff

Kindle and Appstore Widgets 1.4.2

Pete — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:40:15 +0000

New version now available – Fixes a minor bug which would prevent some peoples devices updating correctly under some pretty unlikely circumstances. All sorted now though

Kindle Deal Widgets 1.4, and new Appstore Free App Widget

Pete — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:13:17 +0000

Firstly, new versions of the Kindle Deal Widgets are now available. There’s a variety of behind the scenes bits been added, but the only thing anyone’s likely to notice is slightly better network behaviour and caching, which should make updates much faster and cleaner. This release also adds the French and German localisations to all versions (I’ve got the translations, so why not? ).

However, the real news for today is the availability of an Appstore “Free App Of The Day” widget for the US. This was requested a while ago, but I’ve only just got around to sorting it out. It’s based on the same code that drives the Kindle widgets, so it should be fairly trouble free, but please do get in touch if you find any problems. All the details over here.

Kindle Daily Deal Widget now available for France

Pete — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:34:37 +0000

To complete the current To-Do List, the Kindle Deal widget is now available for the French Offre Éclair Kindle. I’ve attempted a pretty limited set of translations for it, but if anyone can help me out to get the job done properly, I’d appreciate it

Enjoy!

Apologies – DST Problems with US widgets

Pete — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:36:18 +0000

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m afraid the US time zone change broke the US widgets over this weekend. I kind of expected this (not necessarily on my part, but I wasn’t sure if the new daily deal would be subject to DST, etc.), and the good news is that the Widget itself isn’t at fault, just my server-side bits.

In short, all should be well again tomorrow. To get today’s deal shown properly, remove and re-add the widgets to your home screen, or you can see the book here and the MP3 album here. I know it’s not a great solution, and I genuinely hope this error doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

Kindle Daily Deal Widgets 1.3.1 (.de only)

Pete — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:27:10 +0000

Just put out version 1.3.1 of the Kindle Deal widget, but only the German version at the moment. This version adds German language localisation.

I do intend to release localised versions of all the widgets soon (why shouldn’t you be able to check the UK deal in German, if you like the idea?), but there are a few more translations on the way. Where the translations aren’t directly relevant to the target audience, I’d prefer to batch them up and release them all in one hit, rather than annoy everyone with 101 updates that they don’t care about

Kindle Daily Deal Widgets 1.3

Pete — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:54:12 +0000

I’ve just released version 1.3 of the Kindle Daily Deal Widgets, in an effort to work around a bug in the latest version of Android (more details here). In Android Development Speak, ICS doesn’t seem to want to show the Widget in the Widget Picklist after install unless there’s a launcher activity associated with it, so I’ve added an activity which will just take you to the Daily Deal in your browser.

Thanks Google – Nice job

Kindle Daily Deal Widget now available for Germany

Pete — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:41:11 +0000

I’ve now sorted out a version of the Kindle Daily Deal widget for Amazon.de (or the Kindle-Deal Des Tages, as it is there). It’s available on the Android Market here, and should work exactly as the UK and US versions currently do. I’m very keen to get it localised appropriately, but unfortunately I don’t know anyone to sort out German translations. There’s not very much text at all – Please get in touch if you can help me out.

Kindle Daily Deal Widgets 1.2

Pete — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:49:50 +0000

Version 1.2 is now available via the Android Market… It adds the Search and Share buttons to the widget, which I hope are useful. I know that I’ve found myself using the widget as a shortcut to get to Amazon’s site to search for other things, so hopefully I can stop myself doing that now

Enjoy, and please do let me know what you think.

Intermittent DNS issues

Pete — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:41:52 +0000

I realise the futility of posting an outage message on the site that’s likely to be suffering outages, but my DNS provider seems a little shaky at the moment. The Amazon-related apps I’ve got may be refusing to update for prolonged periods, though rest assured that they’ll keep retrying and succeed eventually. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Amazon MP3 Deal Widgets 1.0

Pete — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:40:46 +0000

Having created a bunch of Kindle Widgets, I was browsing around Amazon (UK) and discovered the MP3 album of the week, which I’d never previously found… A short modification of the Kindle Widget code later, and I had an “Amazon MP3 Album Of The Week” widget for the UK.

Of course, Amazon US go one better and have an MP3 Album Daily Deal. Just to trans-atlantically friendly, I did a widget for them too

As with the Kindle Widgets, if you need another territory, I should be able to help you out… Drop me a mail

Details over here…