Publishing Apps
Every now and then I get the idea for a new app or program I’d like to use that no one has made yet. Sometimes I’ll decide that (in theory) I’m a programmer and I can just build the damn thing. I’ll go on a 2 week tear, get something that’s minimally viable, and forget about it forever.
This year I’ve started to do something different - I’m actually publishing my apps once they’re minimally viable. So far this year, I’ve created two pieces of “useful” software:
Rangefinder
This is an android app I created that uses your phone’s camera to help you estimate how far away some distant object is.
I’m notoriously bad at estimating distances and I thought this app would be pretty easy to whip together. Susan and I had some basic Android experience under our belt after her Android Development class at LW Tech, so with that and a lot of web searching I was able to throw this together in a few weeks. I learned a lot about state management in Android Apps, and I got way better at understanding how touch controls and gestures work in software generally. This is also probably the nicest-looking UI I’ve ever developed. Yes, the bar really is that low.
This was my first time publishing an app to the Android store, and to be honest that was more complicated than the whole development process. At one point I accidentally checked a box to put my app into “pre-release” and it was stuck there for 90 days with no way to actually release the damn thing. Thanks Google.
The repo for Rangefinder is here.
Primary Source Scraper
This is a browser extension I created to help understand which sources my news articles reference.
One of the great things about consuming most of my news on the internet is how easy it is to verify the facts in a news article. Some news and opinion sites are truly excellent at linking off to a source for their claims, but there are still a lot of sites that don’t link to any sources, or only link to internal sources (even worse, in my opinion).
After being very frustrated one day that I couldn’t find a single news article about some inane statement from the White House that actually linked to the statement from the White House, I realized that even some of the news sources I consider the most trustworthy weren’t encouraging me to engage with the facts directly. There was a primary source that should have been easily available from whitehouse.gov that no major news site I follow had bothered to link to. Not NPR, not the Washington Post, not the New York Times, not AP - no one I trust to deliver the facts with relatively little bias had provided me with an easy way to see the memo for myself.
I wanted an easy way to understand how well-sourced my news is, and to understand whether the sources that an article links to are relevant, trustworthy sources. This extension aims to highlight all the links in a news article that go to some other site and provide a quick way to find the primary sources that are most relevant to the article I’m reading:
I learned a lot about using javascript to parse news articles, and I learned a lot about how various news sites structure their articles on a webpage. I also learned that Twitter does some tricky stuff to get Tweets to embed directly on a page (which totally breaks looking for a link to the original tweet). Most surprisingly, I learned that AP only links to other AP articles, which I found startling.