It’s been four days since I’ve released Clipper, a simple Android application to keep track of the user’s clipboard. Anything the user copies is stored for later viewing, editing and usage.
So far, I’ve released 2 minor updates to the app, adding the following features:
- Ability to “pin” a clipping: by default, 10 clippings are stored in the history and old ones are automatically pruned. You can save a clipping from doom by pinning it.
- All kinds of UI tweaks and improvements
- And probably the most important feature, Android 1.5 support!
Android devices are running different versions of the operating system – at the time of writing, the newest version is 2.1. The 1.5 version is around a year old, and some devices like the HTC Hero still run it: it’s kind of surprising seeing how even the very first Android phone has been upgraded to 1.6.
At the moment, Clipper’s been downloaded 139 times and 118 of those downloads are active installations (meaning that the application is still active on the user’s device).
It’s not much, but it’s more than I expected, especially seeing how my only method of advertisement was to post a link on reddit’s Android subreddit (as confusing as that sounds). The comments were positive in general and I even got a bug report.
Regarding user feedback on the Android Market, Cyrket has been useful in filing in for Google’s lack of statistics and comments for developers: I can only see the current amount of downloads and active installs and the app rating. I can’t see comments or historical download stats, nor can I reply to user comments.
One user has also been in touch using e-mail: they’ve given me great feedback and many of their ideas have been implemented.
What’s next?
- Start unit testing. Proper TDD practice would be to write tests first, implement second. Android seems to provide a framework for testing the user interface, which sounds like something worth checking out.
- UI improvements and new features. Many users have requested support for notifications in the Android status bar.
- A real website: I think that nanoc3 will work out very well for the purpose.
