RFG App for Android: The official thread!

[theGrue]

[img width=61 height=60]http://i.imgur.com/NKk6j.png[/img][img width=172 height=60]http://www.android.com/images/brand/android_app_on_play_logo_large.png[/img]
Current version is v2.7, released on February 17th, 2016.

[img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/7Zkb0.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/9cddG.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/Nho4x.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/R4lBn.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/dMEXa.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/DVX71.png[/img]

Android? What's that?
Android is a plucky little mobile operating system available only on the T-Mobile G1... Wait, we didn't actually go back in time to March 2009? Oh, right. Android is the most popular smartphone operating system and this is an application to make accessing the site easier on it.

What does the app do?
- Syncs your entire collection to your Android device in seconds.
- Searches the site's massive game database as well as your own collection.
- Views basic game information and images
- Add and delete games to/from your collection

What will it do in the future?
Now that 2.0 is out, I'm planning on adding lots of features at a much quicker pace. My next priority is an overhaul of the game detail pages, including the ability to add games to your collection from within the app.

Here are some general concepts that are on my roadmap for future releases:
- Collection statistics, like on your profile page
- Advanced search options
- Collection filtering options
- Ability to view more game information fields
- Blog reader
- Tablet support

Please let me know if you've got a request for a feature I haven't thought of, or if you want me to give a higher priority to a specific feature I've got listed.

Are there any known issues?
Not really! Report em if you got em.
- Having a decimal place in a game/box/manual quantity will crash the app. Fixed in 2.1!
- Using different capitalization on your username may cause things to act funky. Fixed in 2.4!

If you're having an issue, please post in the thread or send an e-mail and let me know.

Any plans for Android tablets?
It's far off on the roadmap, but yes, tablet support should be doable. I don't have an Android tablet myself, but by the time I get to it, there should be a decent build out for my HP Touchpad that I could install to test it with.

This looks awesome, but I don't have an Android phone! Can you make this for iOS?
Sorry, I don't have any iStuff, so at the moment I cannot. I won't say never, as mobile application development is clearly an interest of mine, and maybe someday I'll get a cute little Mac Mini to run xcode on, but that'd be quite a ways off in the horizon. If you'd like to make one, go right ahead!

As for other platforms, Shadow Kisuragi has expressed some interest in making a WP7 app, but he may be the only one that actually owns a Windows Phone.

Finally, what's this thread for?
A little bit of everything, really. Report bugs, request features, whatever. I'll try to bump it with a development update whenever I make some significant progress, as well as to announce official releases. Major releases will also get an announcement post in my blog, in the case that the site admins want to bump them to the front page.

[bickman2k]

With the site being back, the app works again.

How do I feel about this?
[img width=95 height=69]http://i.imgur.com/7pUSy.gif[/img]

[theGrue]

Ha, thanks bickman!

So I pushed out an update last week and never really made a post about it! Version 2.0 is taking a bit longer than I expected, I'm amazed at how much more there still is out there that I've had to learn. So I re-visited the 1.0 branch to make some improvements here and there. The "Now Loading" screens that keep you from hitting the back button are gone, a progress spinner appears in the header instead. I also made paging through the collection a bit quicker, the Prev/Next buttons no longer wait until loading's completed in order to show up. Finally, I enabled the "fast scroll" feature on all the lists, so when you start scrolling, a little bar you can grab appears and you can scroll faster. You've probably seen it in other apps already.

As far as 2.0 goes, I'm working on the last major hurdle: a service that runs in the background that handles downloading updates to your collection. Since I know some users like the guy above me have enormous collections, I need it to be able to run in the background for a long time to process everything, and a background service is the way to achieve that. I got most of it done today, hopefully I can finish it up tomorrow. After that, the only thing I think I have left to port over are the filtering options and game detail pages. I'm not planning any major overhauls to those (yet), so that should hopefully be quick. Thanks for being patient, everybody!

[Sirgin]

This is becoming a simply amazing app.

Will you be implementing the rating logos (images for the ratings) that have recently been added? They do look cool.

[theGrue]

This is becoming a simply amazing app.

Will you be implementing the rating logos (images for the ratings) that have recently been added? They do look cool.

I'll certainly have to look in to it! Now that I'm a "programmer" on the site, I'm hoping to be able to put a few invisible "hooks" into the game detail pages to make it so the app can parse the detail more easily. Once that's in place, the game detail view will be in for a total overhaul to bring it up to the level of those on the site.

[Madir]

Great work, screenshots look great!

As for other platforms, Shadow Kisuragi has expressed some interest in making a WP7 app, but he may be the only one that actually owns a Windows Phone.

I vote for a Windows Phone 7 version too. Would be great to have this handy tool on the flea markets.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Great work, screenshots look great!

As for other platforms, Shadow Kisuragi has expressed some interest in making a WP7 app, but he may be the only one that actually owns a Windows Phone.

I vote for a Windows Phone 7 version too. Would be great to have this handy tool on the flea markets.

There are multiple people on the site here with a Windows Phone 7. Besides myself, there's Izret101 and Tynstar that I know of. It's something that's on the backburner for me though, considering some of the site changes I need to do.

[theGrue]

There are multiple people on the site here with a Windows Phone 7. Besides myself, there's Izret101 and Tynstar that I know of. It's something that's on the backburner for me though, considering some of the site changes I need to do.

Sorry, it's just way too easy to make jokes about Windows Pho

[theGrue]

So given the theme of the site today, how about an update?

Version 2.0 is almost ready! Yaaay!

I posted some teaser screens a long time ago before the forums got warped back in time, so let's run through the key differences again:

[img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/ktWeQ.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/7Zkb0.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/9cddG.png[/img][img width=180 height=300]http://i.imgur.com/Nho4x.png[/img]

First off, you'll be greeted with a new login screen. Don't worry, I'm not saving your password, just using it to get to your login cookie! Once I've got that, I can perform any function in the app that would require you to be logged in to the website, such as downloading your entire collection rather than browsing through it page by page.

On your first login, the "My Folders" section will be blank for a second, but then you should see the information start to trickle in very quickly. My folder names showed up within seconds, then each one started to get populated with games. I'll admit I was on WiFi, but the time from logging in to loading all ~800 games in my collection was... 8 seconds! Hopefully that scales well to our users with even bigger collections.

From here, you can click on any folder, including the "All" and "Owned" parent folders. The third screenshot shows the "All Folders" view in action, mid-scroll. Grabbing the fast scroll bar on the right will use alphabetical "hints" to help you drill down into your collection quickly. And as you can see in the background, most of these are games from my Collection folder, but an occasional game from my Wishlist shows up as well. If you have a game in multiple folders, each one will be listed underneath the game while you are in the "All" or "Owned" folders. If you open up a single folder, then you won't see the third line with the folder name as it would be quite repetitive, and the game/box/manual totals just move up a line to where they are in the current app.

Finally, searching for games has changed a bit since the last version. Since I've got your collection loaded, why not search that too? And since all that information is on the phone, I can search your collection first, then get the site's search results second. Even though it's now way easier than before to pinpoint a game in your collection because the paging is gone, Quick Search goes and makes it even easier.

All I have left to program is the ability to filter results down within a folder, the current app can do that with console and hardware/software type, and I don't want to take away any functionality. Hopefully I can find the time to get it done early this week, then get it out to my beta testers later in the week, then perhaps the market on the weekend.

[blcklblskt]

I should be getting my Droid this week, so this will be the first app I will download.  I can't wait to use this on flea market days!

[Shadow Kisuragi]

I should be getting my Droid this week, so this will be the first app I will download.  I can't wait to use this on flea market days!

Wow...I didn't think anyone was actually going to purchase a Droid because of our April Fools prank.

[blcklblskt]

I should be getting my Droid this week, so this will be the first app I will download.  I can't wait to use this on flea market days!

Wow...I didn't think anyone was actually going to purchase a Droid because of our April Fools prank.

Nah, it was decided before Android Generation.

[theGrue]

Happy Easter everybody! I pushed 2.0 out to the market last night, then found a couple bugs this afternoon and replaced it with 2.0.1. Check it out and please let me know how it performs for your collection. Since it now requires your login information, I can't test it with any other collections than my own, so I can only cross my fingers that it works as well for everyone else as it does for me.

[blcklblskt]

Awesome!  It works great for me.  I love that I don't have to be connected to the internet to see my collection.  Great work!

[Brianstorm99]

When I sync the only folder that shows anything is Wishlist, and the "Last synced" message only shows up under "For Sale/Trade" (which is empty) ans "Wishlist."

Any suggestions?