SMS Scheduler – Another Amazing Android App Developed by our Android Team
Our Android team is on a spree of developing some amazing Android applications and the latest one that has made way from their stable is ‘SMS Scheduler‘. The Application is the result of the continuous and incessant analysis of the users’ requirements pertaining to sending and receiving SMS’s.
Statistics show there is a continuous rise in the number of text SMS across the World, but even then more often than not, we miss to send important messages to our family, friends, officemates, or business partners on right time. This is where SMS Scheduler for Android comes to your rescue.
By developing this Android app we have tried to supplement the native messaging service with the ability to auto send messages at later point in time. So with SMS Scheduler installed on your Android Phone you can be the first one to send holiday greetings, occasion wishes, reminders, meetings, etc to your family, friends, peers and colleagues.
If you are a happy owner of Android Phone you definitely need to get your hand on one of the most slick, simple yet powerful SMS scheduling Android application with great interface.
About SMS Scheduler and its Features
Use SMS Scheduler and never forget to send those important sms!
SMS scheduler comes with a nice, simple and easy to use interface that allows you to schedule your messages to be sent on specific date and time. You can either schedule a message to be sent to an individual or a group.
No more reminders needed, never miss birthdays, anniversaries, holiday greetings and important meetings. Simply set the date and time for the message to be delivered and leave the rest to your phone to send the message for you. The SMS would be sent automatically without any user interaction.
So this holiday season don’t forget to send your wishes and greetings to your family, relatives and friends!
Features:
1) Choose message text from pre-defined templates
2) Add custom messages to templates
3) Add your own groups
4) Recipients can be typed in directly or selected from contacts
5) Choose multiple recipients to send messages
6) View history of sent and delivered messages
7) Enter messages using Google voice
8) Messages are classified as Scheduled, Sent or Draft
Application Marketplace Link - http://bit.ly/xVFQKi
This is the first version of the application that we have launched. We would be making constant enhancements in our consequent releases to boost its usability. Meanwhile, we would be happy to receive any feedback, opinions and comments that you might have for the application.
Game On!
“Well served!”
“What a spin!”
“Just missed the net!”
“Deuce!”
These aren’t the standard phrases that you would expect to hear at a development company.
But at VinSol, you would hear them many times a day!
Ever since we got a new Table Tennis table, 60 minutes of game play has become a part of our daily routine.
To the average manager / employer, it might seem as a waste of time.
For those who are truly looking to get the best out of their team, this is just what the doctor ordered.
I have seen productivity rise both before and after the game play.
While teams work diligently during the day knowing that their day is shorter by an hour; after the game, they carry the high energy levels to their desk and work with the same zeal they show when trying to win a point during the game.
Not to mention the camaraderie it generates while playing together.
Also, I found an interesting pattern with the teams who are playing regularly.
The sportsman spirit they show during game play is also reflected in their work.
We use Agile frameworks like Scrum and XP to deliver the great work we do.
These frameworks have mature individuals as their cornerstone.
I have seen sportsman spirit transforming into maturity while working with these individuals.
Besides, daily game play also takes care of one’s fitness aspects thereby relieving one of his computer and chair and allowing one to relax his mind and exercise the body at the same time.
I believe that writing good code is an art, not something that can be inculcated by merely reading books and online tutorials.
If we expect such creative skills from individuals/teams, then even we need to think out of the box on how to inculcate such skills in them.
At VinSol, the new TT table was the one of such solutions.
Game on pal!
Expense Tracking Made Easy with Our Android Application – Expense Tracker
Most of us are oblivious of our spending behavior and more often than not end up asking questions like ‘How can I improve my spending habits’? Or ‘how can I hold back unwanted expenses’? Let’s accept it, mainstream population is unmindful of their spending behavior and typically end up overspending (of course some people claim to know where their money is going). It is difficult to fully dispute this claim, but there is a fair degree of skepticism. None of us is a human calculator after all (unless you are not using a traditional pen and paper approach for your book-keeping).
The truth is, without proper analysis we only have a vague sense of where our money goes and this where the real need of an expense tracking mechanism becomes essential. Needless to say, not just any expense tracking application would do. It can be argued that there are many ways to track expenses and one should pick the one that suits the requirements. But at the same time the method should be hassle free and not cumbersome or time consuming. And there is no better way to be able to track your expense on your mobile while you are ‘On the Go’.
After having used a variety of Android applications for expense tracking and management, we were itching to develop our own version of an expense tracking and management app, as we felt there were many apps that lacked user friendly UI, ease of use, were over burdened with features, etc.
What we are able to achieve with our Android application is a simple, clutter free, intuitive yet powerful expense tracking application that addresses the need for monitoring daily expenses.
The application is out in the Android Marketplace and into the hands of many people with Android devices wanting an easy way to track and manage their expenses.
About Expense Tracker and Features
Expense tracking ‘On the Go’ becomes a whole lot easier with this easy to use, intuitive and simple daily expense management application. ‘Expense Tracker’ helps you to manage your money 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.
Just as the expenses do not stop, neither should money management. And with money being a limited commodity (for most of us), it is important to use it judiciously. ‘Expense Tracker’ is developed to help everyone who has the need for financial management and that includes everyone who indulges in economic activity of any nature.
Features:
1) Set reminder for expense entries
2) Track exp on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis
3) Graphical representation
4) Mark expense entries as favorite and later add it as an expense from favorite
5) Take a picture of the expense receipt and save it for future reference
6) Save expense as voice recording
7) Log location of the expense automatically
8) Date and time of the expense is logged automatically
9) Expenses can be modified to a previous date
Application Link - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.vinsol.expensetracker
Apple Deprecated Access to UDID
OK. So some of you might have heard that Apple has deprecated access to UDID.
Well, that’s true….sort of…but what on earth does it mean.
Let’s find out.
Every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch has an identifier unique to that device.
It is called a UDID which stands for Unique Device ID.
Some apps use it directly or some create a hash using it to uniquely identify the user/device.
They use a property called “uniqueIdentifier”.
Apple is now deprecating the method that is used to access the UDID of a device from within the app.
In other words, this method is slated for removal in some time and the apps already using this need to make provisions to transition off it.
Here’s what they say in the documentation.
Now how does Apple’s decision affect the stakeholders.
As for end users, it doesn’t affect them at all.
They have remained oblivious to the presence of UDID and would continue to do so.
There have been some blog posts around users screaming that their privacy is being compromised just because the app is sharing their UDIDs.
Baah! I dont see why that should be a big privacy concern.
There is a significant change for developers / app providers and advertisers however.
Some applications needed to identify individual users, say for subscription purposes.
Either they required all users to have an account at a central location, or they had to identify the user remotely on his device.
UDID helped in the latter scenario.
Using UDID and a little analytics code, the app provider could get valuable insights into the usage of the app.
However, with UDID going away, each app would have to create its own identifier for each device.
While that alone would not be a problem, the issue would be in reconciling this data with the previous data that used other means of identifying a user (UDID or a hash based on it).
So unless the app developers can find out a cunning way to reconcile the data, they would be starting afresh essentially.
Because this analytics data was the advertisers’ holy grail, they have nothing to cheer about either.
But why is Apple doing this anyways?
Well, “Who is John Galt”?
[I am reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand of late and this phrase stuck.]
Some highlight privacy concerns, including law suits, raised by some users of late (which I find frivolous).
However, there might be a hidden agenda of Apple in seeking to discontinue use of UDID.
Apple gets a share of the revenue generated by selling paid apps on its store.
It also gains from paid subscriptions.
Normally, when you buy a paid app, you can download it on another device at no extra cost by signing in with the same Apple id.
Apple gains on the first purchase, but subsequent installs don’t add to its coffers.
However, there are some paid apps that charge you for every install.
So if you paid a dollar when you bought and installed the app on your iPhone, you might have to pay some more to install the app on a new device, say your iPad.
This model is made possible only by identifying the devices individually and not necessarily the user alone.
Doing away with UDID would do away with this model too.
Could that be the reason?
Well, we would see.
Enough of doom and gloom.
There’s still a way out.
If you don’t really require any feature offered by iOS 5 SDK, you can continue to use any lower version and still access a device’s UDID.
The access is going to be deprecated only for iOS 5 SDK.
So unless you want to use iOS 5 SDK, you are good.
So long.
Does Agile Manifesto Need Changes? The 10 Years Experience!
I delivered a presentation on the above topic earlier this year at an Agile Conference in NCR, India.
I have summed up my thoughts below.
On a cold winter morning of 13 Feb 2001, at a ski resort in Utah, the Agile Manifesto was born.
The newborn had 17 fathers (ahem ahem), all stalwarts of the software industry, trying to be Agile in their own way, ahead of their times.
Though some leading software practitioners were following some form of Agile (without calling it that), the real precipitation of thoughts happened in February 2001.
And thus emerged the Agile methodology of software development as we have come to know it.
In 2011, while the whole Agile community was united in celebration of 10 years of Agile, there were a lot of Agile practitioners who felt the need for a change – maybe a change from Agile to another methodology (like Agile was to Waterfall), or changes in the basic foundation of Agile (the Agile Manifesto and its 12 core principles).
This whole dissonance stemmed from not achieving the kind of success we had hoped for.
Their concerns did resonate with me but when I dug a little deeper, I realised that difference between our results and expectations arose from the way Agile was implemented, the way it was morphed into something else, a commonly known phenomena as “Agile-but”. (You might have hears people saying, “we do Agile but….instead of X we do Y”).
It is completely okay to let Agile fit your organisation as it is not a set of commandments one ought to follow. But there is a “spirit” that is embodied in the Manifesto and the principles which should never be compromised.
I agree that it is really tough to explain that spirit in words but you would get a sense of it once you start “living” Agile, not just following it, or doing it, or practicing it.
(God! I am sounding like Yoda instructing Luke Skywalker: “You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock… everywhere!”)
While I was preparing for this presentation, I came across a wonderful tongue-in-cheek take on Agile
We have heard about new ways of developing software bypaying consultants and reading Gartner reports. Through
this we have been told to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
and we have mandatory processes and tools to control how those
individuals (we prefer the term ‘resources’) interact
Working software over comprehensive documentation
as long as that software is comprehensively documented
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
within the boundaries of strict contracts, of course, and subject to rigorous change control
Responding to change over following a plan
provided a detailed plan is in place to respond to the change, and it is followed precisely
That is, while the items on the left sound nice
in theory, we’re an enterprise company, and there’s
no way we’re letting go of the items on the right.
The above conveys my sentiments on the current state of “Agile” well.
And let me not stop there.
I have come across enough real-life examples to illustrate this.
These examples are from companies / projects based on Agile methodology.
I have mentioned them under the statement that they seem to violate
Individuals And Interactions Over Processes And Tools
1. “This part was not implemented because it was not written in the user story. So what if it was discussed.”
2. “Please create a ticket/story for whatever you want to be done”
3. QA/Tester: “Wait. Don’t fix the issue now. Let me first create a ticket on it”
Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
1. “We are Agile. We don’t document”
2. “User stories need to include even the last bit of detail”
3. After a sequence of changes over time with a functionality, “Make sure you reflect the changes in the stories”
Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
1. “Lets write detailed user stories about the features that would go into the project so that the customer/developer is bound by them”…(later)…“Hey, that was not in the scope”
Responding To Change Over Following A Plan
1. “We are Agile. We don’t plan”…(LOL)
2. “We never discussed this feature”
3. “I don’t care if your system crashed, I want this functionality delivered by weekend”
I would like to share a quote that, I believe, truly represents that spirit of being Agile
Float like a butterfly,
sting like a bee
- Boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
Wrapping this up, saying that Agile needs change when we were not able to implement it properly is akin to saying that one has wrong feet when he is wearing shoes wrongly.
