Need help naming my Android app

Thanks ilwrath. Do you have any devices with a physical keyboard or even a trackball? I don't, just played with it using the emulator. I did test it under 4.0 in the emulator as well, but a real device would be nice. Not sure when my Nexus S will get the 4.0 update, although I expect it soon as the Nexus Galaxies are out.

But ya, you'll need access to a PC with WinAMP and the AjaxAMP plugin. Without that, all it'll do is present a dialog telling you to configure your system and dump you into the settings activity. Not very exciting. One key thing that I put effort into is making sure errors are properly trapped and presented in a useful way. Since networking is involved, many people will be intimidated or confused. But lots can happen that might confuse even pros, like when it fails to connect because there is no WiFi available and you've disabled your 3G data. It detects that case and tells you to either connect via WiFi or enable your 3G. Much better than a "Failed to connect" error. Still, a host located at 192.168.*.* is not likely to ever work over 3G, I don't check for that, maybe I should.

I will also need to have a good help page to walk people through installing WinAMP with the AjaxAMP plugin. Luckily the AjaxAMP plugin has it's own website with help, but I'll need to cover some of the basics. It's actually a fairly advanced plugin and even has authentication and an IP filter - which is more than what I've seen from other similar plugins.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
AmpJack
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I like that. Slick and gets to the point. And it even kinda hints at the Ajax plugin, but doesn't tie itself too much to it which is good because I was considering making my own app modular enough to work with different servers - none of which I wrote (I specifically designed it so that all AjaxAMP specific stuff is in one class and it abstracts all the operations sent over the net - plugging in a different interface class should be trivial). Meaning, I'll be "jacking" them for my own use. I'll see what the GF has to say about that. :D

Btw, AjaxAMP *kinda* works with MediaMonkey. Not sure if anyone here uses that, but I tried it out yesterday. MediaMonkey claims to provide the WinAMP plugin interface. AjaxAMP does control MediaMonkey's basic operations like Play/Pause/etc, but does NOT provide current playing song info or playlist. I do however get access to AjaxAMP's media library but can't really do much with it other than browse. Too bad, it would have been neat to actually have an interface for two different music players out of the box.
 
Still, a host located at 192.168.*.* is not likely to ever work over 3G, I don't check for that, maybe I should.
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Yeah, in fact, you might want to limit it to WiFi by default, as it seems unlikely any home user would have a PC directly accessible on the internet.

The Droid 2 and Droid 3 phones have physical keyboards. And I have one of each in my test fleet. (In fact, I also have one as my actual phone -- I love me some keyboard!) I don't have any of the really early Droids with trackball, though. We used Blackberry back in those prehistoric times... (As as an aside, I'm wondering why I still have a BlackBerry Bold in my test collection. I decommissioned the BES a few weeks ago. I have a feeling this phone isn't going to be very useful, anymore!)
 
Ya, by default it now works only with wifi, but there's a setting you can set to allow mobile data networks as well. There's little reason to ever use a mobile network, but at the same time, there's little reason to ban it as well.

I did come up with a couple more names to consider:
1) Ampwifi
2) iOnAmp (or Ampion - pronounced in a way that rhymes with "Champion")

I came up with #1 but surprisingly my totally non-techy girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever came up with the Ion Amp combo. Why didn't I think of that? I like them both equally and I think those are the two I will choose from. Sorry Fluffy, AmpJack has been shot down as not rolling off the tongue smoothly enough.

I was writing up some online help for the app on the weekend so that I can start handing it out to beta testers. Since this is a network app, ease of configuration can be a limiting factor in it's adoption. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice if it could somehow auto detect the AjaxAMP server? Then I remembered that the latest Winamp has a feature to sync with Android phones which means it may be broadcasting it's location on the network. So I broke out the Process Explorer and found it has a couple of UDP ports open. That looked promising. So I fire up Wireshark and to my disappointment (and surprise) it's the Android devices (running Winamp for Android) that broadcast their location and Winamp detects the devices. That seemed backwards to me. However, to my surprise (and delight), the AjaxAMP plugin itself was broadcasting it's location!!! That surprised me because I wasn't aware of what could use this, but then I remembered that the plugin has some weird feature where it can stream music from another windows machine running winamp+AjaxAMP, so I guess it uses it for that. So anyway, using Wireshark I was able to reverse engineer the contents of the broadcast datagram packet and I can get the computer name along with the IP address and port that AjaxAMP is listening on. So a little bit of scope creep here as I'm adding a new feature to scan for available servers. So far it's coming along nicely and should make setup a million times more straightforward even for non techies. Of course you'll still be able to add/edit servers manually. I'm excited!
 
Glaucus said:
I came up with #1 but surprisingly my totally non-techy girlfriend/wife/partner/whatever came up with the Ion Amp combo. Why didn't I think of that? I like them both equally and I think those are the two I will choose from. Sorry Fluffy, AmpJack has been shot down as not rolling off the tongue smoothly enough.
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I'm partial to #1 so long as you pronounce ampwifi as "amp-we-fie"
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
I'm partial to #1 so long as you pronounce ampwifi as "amp-we-fie"
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Ya, that's how I pronounce it as well. Clearly a play on the word "Amplify".

Only bad thing is that there's a company out there called Amp WiFi. They're a wireless internet service provider. Based on their phone number, they seem to be based out of Kentucky. On their website they refer to their company as Amp WiFi - note the space between Amp & WiFi. I'm not sure if they'd come after me, although there's a good chance they won't ever hear of my app. I suppose I could try to trademark the name but I'm guessing that requires money, which sucks.
 
I was going to suggest AirJax but that name is used by other things.

Andrax?
 
Thanks Minator. AirJax, or even AmpJax, sound nice, but like you said, AirJax is clearly used for other things - although possibly unrelated.

As for Andrax? Not bad, but it reminds me a little too much of Anthrax. :)
 
Glaucus said:
Thanks Minator. AirJax, or even AmpJax, sound nice, but like you said, AirJax is clearly used for other things - although possibly unrelated.

As for Andrax? Not bad, but it reminds me a little too much of Anthrax. :)
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I even hate myself for this, but don't you want your creation to be viewed as a killer app?

/gets coat.
 
Ok, so I've settled on Ampwifi. What the heck!

My goal is now to release it to market by early March. I created a bunch of help docs and I spent the last few days on creating a icon (which I suck at, but thank the gods for internet photoshop tutorials).

So anyone wanna try it out? I can send you the app via email. You'll also need to install Winamp & the AjaxAMP plugin. I'd like to try it out on some different hardware to minimize the "surprise" I'll get when it's released on the market and people try to install it on all sorts of things (I'll probably limit it to more recent versions of Android, but still...). So far, I've tested it on:
Nexus S 2.3.6
Samsung Galaxy Captivate 2.2
ASUS EeePad Transformer Prime 4.0.3

If you're interested just send me a private message including your email address so that I can send the .apk to you. Installing it is easy, just open the email I send you using any email reader like GMail and it will ask you to install. You'll need to make sure that the Applications -> Unknown sources setting is checked (for Android 4 devices you'll need to go to Security -> Device Administration -> Unknown sources). That's it! Of course, you'll also need a wifi access point on your network.
 
Hi Mike,

I just saw your fb post and went to Android market place on my phone. Couldn't find Ampwifi.

I don't use winAmp but was going to give it a go anyway. I have a Wildfire S.
 
Update:
Just tried to log in from my laptop and got this message:
"this item cannot be installed in your device's country."
 
Well, as Robert already knows, it's all official now, my app is on the market!

Ampwifi

Published it last night. So far only one download and it was me. :)

If you click on that link and can't see it, it may be because I had country filters on (although anyone in Canada & the US should see it). Those were removed this morning but it may take a few hours to propagate through. It's probably good to go by the time you read this Robert, let me know (and thanks).

Btw, the Wildfire S will be an excellent test device as HTC has made a lot more modifications than other manufactures, and are known to have introduced some serious bugs. The worst that I know is that some of their devices (not sure which) use a default socket buffer of 8MB. That buffer is 3 times the size of my entire app, and considering it's multi-threaded with potentially multiple sockets in use, and well, it can turn nasty real quick. Luckily I stumbled across that and made sure to override the default with an 8KB buffer. ;) But don't get me wrong, I do like the HTC handsets and can't wait to see their next line of ICS phones coming on the market soon.

Now, that version 1.0 is out the door, I can start working on 1.1. I have a long list of features I'd like to add, my plan is to keep a constant trickle of feature updates (but not too often as updating apps gets old fast).
 
@Mike:

Thanks. I've downloaded it but can't say when I'll next have Windows running to try it. Hopefully tomorrow. :pint:
 
Robert said:
@Mike:

Thanks. I've downloaded it but can't say when I'll next have Windows running to try it. Hopefully tomorrow. :pint:
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Thanks man, I appreciate it. Of course, it's the worlds most boring app if you don't have Winamp running. ;)
 
Glaucus said:
Thanks man, I appreciate it. Of course, it's the worlds most boring app if you don't have Winamp running. ;)
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OK, I booted into Win7, downloaded winAmp and AjaxAmp, installed, configured and got AjaxAmp showing in the browser but Ampwifi is reporting a failure to connect.

I've obviously missed a bit.

-EDIT-

my mistake: missed a dot in the IP address.

Cool app Mike, if a little footery to set up.
 
Hmmm... Damn. Ok, first thought is firewall. I can'tr remember if I had to open up a port, but I use Kaspersky which I think asks me what to do when I first run an app. Firewalls ruin all the fun.

Did you do the scan for servers? Did it list any? If not, you may need to manually enter it. The scan for server should work so long as you're on the same subnet mask and that Winamp & AjaxAMP are running. Basically, AjaxAMP broadcasts on port 51515 every 2 or 3 seconds a packet with some useful info. So the only things that I can think of that would prevent you from getting that packet are:
1) Your windows firewall is eating it. It shouldn't eat the outgoing packet, but it may prevent an incomming connection from Ampwifi.
2) Your Android device is not on the same subnet. Check that your IP address on your windows PC and your Android device have the same 3 sets of numbers in your IP address. In other words, they should both be something like: 192.168.0.X or 192.168.1.X, etc. You can still connect if they are not on the same subnet, but the scan for servers will fail because AjaxAMP broadcasts to it's own subnet only.
3) Your Android device's wifi may be off. This sounds like a no brainer, but I ran into this myself a number of times. If your wifi is off, your phone may be using your cellular data connection. Scan for servers will not work if that's true. Of course, it should warn you that you're using a cellular network and in fact you need to enable it in the settings and when you do so it warns you there as well. So this probably isn't it, but you might want to check it anyway.

If that doesn't help, I'll have to think some more. I always knew that setup may be an issue for this app, this really helps me. I may need some better instructions or cleaner dialogs/instructions. Thanks again for your help.
 
One more thing: Have you tried getting AjaxAMP in your Android's browser? That should eliminate the firewall if it does connect.
 
Ah, I see you got it up and running. Sweet. Had me worried there for a sec. Would still like to know if the scan for servers worked out for you, and if not, any thoughts as to why not. Thanks again.
 
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