Android Metronome

Author: Christopher Souvey

15 Nov

About 3 weeks ago, I bought a T-Mobile G1 (the Android-based “GooglePhone”). I’ve been working in my free time for the last 2 weeks on learning the Android SDK so I could write some programs for it. The first program decided to write was a program for musicians. Yesterday (November 15), I finally got the first feature–the metronome–in a working state. I uploaded by application to the Android Market (same idea as the iPhone’s App Store, but until Q1, everything has to be free). Now nearly 24 hours and 3 updates (suggested feature additions and bug fixes), my app has 2175 downloads (1638 active installs) and 110 reviews (with an average of 4/5 — there is not a single app with a 5/5, the highest so far is 4.5/5). I’ve already received 9 emails about the application.

Not bad for the first 24 hours of my first Android app (and first Java app in a very long time)

In fact, in one day, this app has gotten more users than all my previous programming projects combined! And its not even close to done yet!

I’ll continue to post updates on this and my (hopefully many) future apps.

Filed under: Android, Life, Musical, Technology

7 Responses for "Android Metronome"

Pierpaolo Rosin January 7th, 2009 at 9:49 am 1
Hi Christopher,
I’m a newbie Android developer.
I couldn’t run your applications because I still don’t own a googlephone, but I have to say that your application’s graphical interface is very simple and intuitive. As I’m interested in learning how you get this result, can I ask you which is your preferred strategy in interface design? In particular: do you design your own icons, do you download them or do you pay someone for creating them? Thank you for your answer.
pierpaolo
Christopher Souvey January 7th, 2009 at 9:59 am 2
@Pierpaolo: I did all the graphics for the application myself in Inkscape (open source equivalent of Adobe Illustrator), but only because I had no choice. When possible I try to find icons in Creative Commons that are already available, but there usually isn’t something that exactly meets my needs. I’m by no means a designer and would prefer not to have to put so much effort into figuring out how to make it look decent (since it doesn’t come naturally to me), but since I currently don’t make any money off this application, I can’t pay someone better to do the design work for me.
Christopher Souvey January 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am 3
@Pierpaolo: I just looked at the screenshot you were looking at, and if you are referring to the icons used in the menu (enable metronome and main menu), I got those from the Android source repository (since Android is open source, any menu icon used in any program on the phone can be used for free)
Pierpaolo Rosin January 8th, 2009 at 2:32 am 4
Thank you very much, Christopher, very useful to me!
Evan Lewis January 29th, 2010 at 10:20 am 5
Thanks for the information Christopher. I am wondering if you called the media player to play back the “tick-tock” sound of the metronome or if you accessed core audio?
Christopher Souvey January 29th, 2010 at 12:22 pm 6
I use SoundPool, which is much lower level than media player
It just provides a convenient way to setup and trigger short sounds at the core level
Alex Sherer January 31st, 2010 at 1:45 am 7
I just bought the Pro version and I have to say I am quite impressed. In a future update (somewhere down the line obviously) I would love to see pitchable drums but other than that, I love the metronome, keyboard (tried your easy to learn stuff and can’t wait to download tons more). I am a pecussionist and percussion instructor and I love the functionality of this app. I am happy to help support programs like this, so please keep up the good work.

thanks again
Alex

oh and I am running on a Droid Eris w/Android 1.5