I haven’t been doing any on-the-side Android stuff much lately, but I did publish a new app yesterday. This one’s called I’M IMPATIENT and it fills a very specific (and annoying) niche for me.
I think the worst app that I use regularly is the Facebook app. It is very poor because every time you open it (unless you’ve opened it 5 seconds earlier), you have to wait 30 seconds for it to load your news feed. It has “improved” in recent versions, but it already has a horrible rap in my opinion. While waiting what must be hours of my life away, I’m always wondering why is it taking so long; is it downloading full resolution versions of all the photos on your news feed and then resizing them on your device? or is it because my network connection is not working correctly?
I don’t know the internals of the Facebook app, but I can check the latter – so I built I’M IMPATIENT as a tool I can switch to for 10s and have it monitor the network traffic in real time. There are a lot of apps that measure your overall data usage (for billing and quota purposes), but I couldn’t find one which will show my current, detailed usage.
I actually started working on this app in January, just putting the groundwork together to get the traffic data. Then I lost interest and the source code until earlier this month (well I never did find my original source). The app itself is fairly simple and didn’t take a long time to put together – at least the initial version; I’ll have to pretty it up and put more bells & whistles in when I feel motivated to do so.
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