I was always uneasy about publishing my software on any proprietary platform, especially Google Play. When you do that – you give up all control over the distribution of your application. Not only is it required to be proprietary (you can’t open-source your Google signing key) but the publisher can choose to take down your …
Continue reading The inevitable happenedEveryone’s Timetable
Our school moved to PeopleSoft for.. I’m not going there.. but that’s where everyone’s timetables are now. I thought maybe this big fancy company has an API to let me access the data but no, it’s basically impossible to access the API directly. So I was left with screen scraping, which I always wanted to …
Continue reading Screen scraping timetable data from a PeopleSoft Faculty CenterAfter more than a year of work I finally got this app into a stable, usable state and published it. Everyone’s Timetable is an Android app to help people in a school share their timetable. It’s particularly useful for finding a professor’s timetable though I’ve discovered it’s actually quite a handy way to look at …
Continue reading Announcing Everyone’s TimetableOne of the interesting challenges working on Everyone’s Timetable is that it’s a live application with a server backend. That means that any one of the following can cause a very serious problem: A change to the Android app that’s not compatible with the PHP server code A change to the PHP server code that’s …
Continue reading Development/production setup for work on live Android app with a server backend