287 - Dancing with the Droids

Day 287. Androidify is a neat little app for Android that let's you make customised versions of the Android robot. The app got an update recently that adds lots of extra "dress up" features, but also adds actions then saves as an animated GIF file. Like this. Dance little Android!

258 - The Droid You're Looking For

Day 258. I shot a video of this little toy Android the other day, then used the 5Second app to turn it into a looping (or is that limping) GIF file. Keep marching little Droid, keep marching!

256 - ColourVoter

Day 256. More playing about with Android App Inventor today and I made another very simple (and when I say very simple, I mean VERY simple) app called ColourVoter. It just has three buttons - Yes, No, Not Sure - that turn the screen different colours. The idea would be that if you were presenting an idea to a group of people and they all had the app, you could check for understanding by asking them to click the appropriate button and hold their phone up. At a glance, seeing lots of green means they get it, red means they don't get it, and orange means you have some more explaining to do.

If you want to download it and try it out you can download the .apk file here. (You need dev permissions on your phone to install it, and of course this is Android only)

232 - Whip It Good

Day 232. I've been dabbling with Android App Inventor 2, (thanks Kevin Brookhouser!) and wow, what a huge improvement from version 1! This is so much more usable, and easy to get started with. If you're on the same wifi network it just connects to your phone, runs and compiles with no need to futz about with Java runtimes and so on. It fantastic.

I plan to learn lots more about this, but here's just a really simple project I made based on an idea that Kevin showed me. You may have seen that Big Bang Theory episode where they have an iPhone app that makes a whipping sound? There are a bunch of these apps in the App Store and Play Store, but why not create one more? I built my own app for doing this.

If you have an Android device you can grab the apk file here and try it yourself. https://www.dropbox.com/s/q2a2hyznety8cm7/BigBangWhip.apk?dl=0  (To install it you'll need to allow files from unknown developers in the Developer Options, but it's safe, trust me.)

194 - Swiftkey Surrealism

Day 194. One of the must-have apps for my Nexus phone and tablet is Swiftkey, a third party replacement keyboard for the standard built-in Android keyboard. I like it a lot, and find it really helps with typing on a small screen. It does this by connecting to my Gmail account, blog, Facebook and Twitter, and it begins to learn my writing style. It becomes predictive over time, and based on my previous writing, it makes three guesses at the next word I'm probably about to type and lets me tap on one of those three suggested words instead of having to actually type it letter by letter. Once you get used to it, it's a real time saver.

The following piece of prose was composed by allowing Swiftkey to predict the next word in the sentence without me actually typing any of these words. Remember it offers three words each time, and I was sometimes choosing what I thought would be the best word, but mostly I just continually went with the very first suggestion it was making. The end result reads with a kind of surreal twist. Andre Breton, one of the members of the original Surrealist group, was a fan of this idea of "automatic writing", and loved the concept of letting randomness dictate the path of an idea without conscious intervention.

Hello there. 

The only thing that you can probably tell me more about the same time as the other day and night out on the weekend of the exhibit was not as bad as the first time in my opinion. If you want to know about this site or any other questions please contact us for a few minutes to get the best thing to remember. 

If the weather has been fantastic at the time but you will need to know that you can get the best thing to do with the new year, the only way to go back and forth between us and the rest of your choice of seats for the next three weeks of work for you can get a free email account from the airport. The first time buyers are not responsible for delivering the highest quality of our lives. We will catch up another day or two to get the school holidays in Spain. 

This means you will need to know about the demise of Reader and the kids are doing it tough to the answer. He has taught me how much you could save money on your computer and the rest of your life is not a problem for the next few years. Still, it's not just the right thing to do with the following areas of interest and the other side of the exhibit. There are ways of working with a group of friends who were not able to offer the same thing as the first time. 

This means we can help you out of the pirate ship to Australia in the sunshine looking at art and design of the exhibit. The only way to get the best way to go to the nearest airport is the most important part of my life and work with the new year.

166 - Hello World

Day 166. This is more like the start of a create than a create itself, since what I created is not really functional or useful yet. But today I downloaded the Android Software Developers Kit from the Google Developers site and installed it. I used to be a member of the Apple Developer Program, but it expired and rather than spend $99 I thought I'd move over to see what I could do using Eclipse on the Android side of things.

Learning to program is not easy and there is lots of stuff to figure out, but I spent a good few hours this morning dabbling with code and working through the SDK tutorials. Still a l-o-n-g way to go before I make anything worthwhile - right now all I have is an app on my Nexus 5 that lets me type in some text and a button that doesn't yet do anything - but it's a start. You might not think this is a creative thing, but I don't care. My brain still hurts.

122 - Glassy Eyed

Day 122. This photo was taken on my Nexus 5 using the new blur mode of the recent Android Camera update. It uses a very clever algorithm that manages to identify the foreground and background of the image and the introduce blur to simulate the short depth of field that you'd usually only get from a proper DSLR camera. It's not perfect but it's pretty interesting.

After that I did a little bit of post processing using the filters and adjustment tools in the Android camera app. Phone photography sure has come a long way!

091 - A Few Good Men

Day 91. One of our English teachers at school asked if I knew of an easy way to visualise characters. Her students were reading a novel and she wanted them to create drawings of how the characters looked in their heads.

My first thought was to use a police identikit to construct the faces. A quick search turned up FlashFace at http://flashface.ctapt.de/. It also has an app for both iOS and Android. The web version is pretty good and does quite a lot, but the free version on Android is a bit limited, and only does male faces.

Still, it's worth a look and it made the English teacher very happy.

076 - 300 Frames

We live just up the street from a frame shop, which sits on the corner of the intersection. While out walking the dog tonight I stopped near the frame shop and was struck with an idea to make a stop frame animation. So this is 300 frames at the frame shop.

It was shot on my Nexus 4 phone using an app called Lapse It Pro, then rendered and exported as 720 mp4 files, editing with a Android Movie Studio, and uploaded to YouTube. It's proof that you can make media on Android but let's be honest, it's still got a lot of catching up to do to compare with the media production capabilities of iOS.

058 - All Android, All the Time

Day 58. Today I used an Android app called Androidify to create these cute little Android variants. I actually used the randomize function in that app, (and a small amount of aesthetic intervention) to make these little fellows, then saved them to the gallery before importing them into Diptic.

I know this is similar to the robots I made the other day, but I wanted to make something similar on Android instead of iOS.

030 - Heroic Figures

Day 30. This simple little cartoon was created using an Android app called Make a Superhero. It lets you mix and match superhero body parts - heads, arms, legs, etc - with different costume parts to design your own character. It's simple, but a bit of fun. After making it I dropped it into SnapSeed just to filter the colours a little, then posted it here using the Blogger app for Android.