Android Developer

среда, 14 мая 2008 г.

Android application that fills the niche

Android will help you to be imaginative. Maybe he will even try to be imaginative by himself. How will he do it? Using images. Images you create and images you adopt from the others.

There are plenty of sources of images - world you see, world you dream, sites dedicated to store images, like flickr.com and picasaweb.google.com.

This application not only enables you to search, browse, mark, store locally and categorize photos loaded from these sites. It is developed to be very responsible to user interaction, this goal is achieved through asynchronous communication with the server - photos and other data is downloaded while you use the data that is already downloaded, and through caching of photos and other data. The other notable feature is semantic categorization of the photos - the basic one is already implemented, and I have many interesting ideas, how to do it in a really unique way!

Here is some screenshots of my application that demonstrates its features. This is working and tested application, not just something done in Photoshop!

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 1 demonstrates asynchronous communication with the server - the images are downloaded while you browse the images you have in your phone. If you don't scroll to the images that are not loaded yet, application will not try to download them, and you will not consume internet traffic.

Figure 2 demonstrates that keywords can be assigned to the images. The basic of the keyword set is the keywords, that were assigned by the author of the image, but you can add your own keywords too.

Figure 3 demonstrates the feature that is normally present in all digital cameras, but that was not so ease to implement in pre-alpha Android emulator - zooming.

So, let's start from the beginning of user experience. Start screen can operate in four modes:

Figure 4 - search

Figure 5 - albums
Figure 6 - authors
Figure 7 - tags

Figure 6 - album list
Figure 6 - marking
User experience starts from searching photos by keywords. He can continue navigation by browsing the album the photo belongs to or by browsing all photos of the author of the photo. The list of albums created by the author, summary, detailed information about the picture and tags that the author assigned to the picture are available.
The album and the author of the photo can be marked and this mark is stored in the database for future use. A photo (in a form of thumbnail, the size of it is calculated from screen resolution) can be stored locally in the smartphone with tags, assigned by the author or with any tag user wants it to be stored. Stored photo can be found by browsing all photos of the selected tag. For photos stored locally zooming is enabled. When the user starts zooming for the very first time, full-size image is loaded from Picasa(TM) web site and stored in the smartphone.
In the front page 1 search mode and 3 browse modes are available. In the browse modes the user can make selection from the list that corresponds to the chosen mode, and use input box to provide filters ( '*' pattern is available) to narrow the list of options.

Things that were planned, but were not implemented:
1. Photos upload. Current Android emulator has limited support of SSL, it prevented me from implementing photos upload. I believe I can do this with real phone.
2. Collaboration functions - sharing of albums will be implemented.
3. As I have said, I have some very interesting ideas about semantic categorization of photos and albums, but it will take some time to implement them.


You may leave your comment in this page, contact me personally or visit http://ua.linkedin.com/in/kovalov.
Мой новый проект для решения пазлов: Подбор Слов