https://market.android.com/details?id=com.orby.nightmode

I had this really cool feature in my Nexus One few months ago but I did a hard reset and I lost it. It’s quite simple app but really useful, I’m talking about a Night Mode. Basically you can set from what time you want your phone in silence (or just vibrate mode) and when you want to turn on the sound again. As you can see it’s pretty simple but still we’ll have to deal with few things that I’ll explain right now.

First of all… how this will work? I’ll use a listview with all my “alarms” and some details for each of them:

• Name of the night mode
• Start hour
• End hour
• Days of the week, which basically means that if you set Monday and Tuesday, this concrete alarm will be fired just those days so you can set different night modes depending on the day or even two or more night modes for the same day.
• Vibrate, just if you want to active vibrate mode or you just want everything off.

Regarding to the weekdays, if we have set an alarm for Monday from 10am to 15am there’s no problem, but if we’ve set the alarm on Monday from 11pm to 8am (end hour < start hour) then the alarm will be fire next day (11pm on Monday and 8am on Tuesday). So far so good.

There are few thing you should know if you are working with alarms in Android, some technical stuff is coming.

1. You need to set the alarms everytime you reboot the phone. All the alarms are deleted (Android thing) when you reboot your phone. I’ve implemented a receiver that triggers on when it detects a reboot so it can reload all the alarms.
2. There’s no such a thing like “repeating days” or something similar in the Android alarm’s, that’s why you need to update the alarms when they are fired, which means getting the information, knowing when you have to fired the alarm the next time and so on.

I’ll go ahead and show you a bit of my code.

This is part of my receiver when an alarm fires on.

 public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
        try {

            // getting the extras from the intent
            Bundle bundle = intent.getExtras();
            // on or off
            Integer on = bundle.getInt("on")
            // id of the alarm
            Integer id = bundle.getInt("id");

            if(id>0){
                Integer difference = 1;
                Calendar currDateTime = new GregorianCalendar();
                NMClass nm = new NMClass(context);    
                // fetching from SQLlite the data related to the id
                nm.fetchNM(id);
                // getting the next day we have to set the alarm        
                int nextday;
                // Day of the week
                int weekDay = currDateTime.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
                // Monday is 0, Tuesday 1...
                int weekDayApp = ((weekDay+5) % 7);

                AudioManager aManager=(AudioManager)context.getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE);
                // setting next alarm time based on hour parameters
                Calendar nextAlarmTime = new GregorianCalendar();                        
                nextAlarmTime.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);

                // if on we have to set to off and turn off the sounds
                if(on==1){
                    on=0;
                    // we get the next day to turn off the alarm
                    nextDay = nm.closestDay(false);
                    nextAlarmTime.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, nm.getHourEnd());
                    nextAlarmTime.set(Calendar.MINUTE, nm.getMinuteEnd());
                    // vibration on or off?
                    if(nm.isVibrate())
                        aManager.setRingerMode(AudioManager.RINGER_MODE_VIBRATE);
                    else
                        aManager.setRingerMode(AudioManager.RINGER_MODE_SILENT);
                }
                // else we set to on and turn on the sounds
                else{
                    on=1;
                    // we get the next day to turn on the alarm
                    nextDay = nm.closestDay(true);

                    nextAlarmTime.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, nm.getHourIni());
                    nextAlarmTime.set(Calendar.MINUTE, nm.getMinuteIni());
                    aManager.setRingerMode(AudioManager.RINGER_MODE_NORMAL);
                }

                difference = nextDay - weekDayApp;

                // difference between days, if < 0 is next week
                if(difference < 0)
                    difference = 7+difference;

                // add the difference to get the next day
                nextAlarmTime.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH,difference);

                Intent intentAlarm = new Intent(context, NMReceiver.class);

                intentAlarm.putExtra("on", on);
                intentAlarm.putExtra("id", id);
                // We use the id of the alarm to set the intent
                PendingIntent sender = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, id, intentAlarm, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);

                // Get the AlarmManager service
                AlarmManager am = (AlarmManager) context.getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);

                // Cancel just in case we have updated the alarm
                am.cancel(sender);
                am.set(AlarmManager.RTC_WAKEUP, nextAlarmTime.getTimeInMillis(), sender);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Toast.makeText(context, e.getMessage(), Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
            e.printStackTrace();
            Log.d("ERROR",e.getMessage());
        }
    }

For those wondering about the closestDay method, here you have an spoiler. I basically have a boolean array which has 7 positions with true or false depending if the weekday was set or not. v[0] would be monday and so on. The comments and code are explained pretty well by themselves.

	Calendar currDateTime = new GregorianCalendar();
	Calendar timeIni = new GregorianCalendar();
	timeIni.set(CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.YEAR), CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.MONTH), CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH), hourIni, minuteIni);
	Calendar timeEnd = new GregorianCalendar();
	timeEnd.set(CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.YEAR), CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.MONTH), CurrDateTime.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH), hourEnd, minuteEnd);
        int weekDay = currDateTime.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
        // Monday 0, Tuesday 1...
        int currentday = ((weekDay+5) % 7);
        int dayAux = currentDay;
        for(int i=0; i<=6;i++){
            //turn off the sound
            if(ini){
                // if it's today
                if(v[dayAux] && currDateTime.getTimeInMillis() <= timeIni.getTimeInMillis())
                    return dayAux;
            }
            // turn on the sound again
            else
                // if it's today
                if(v[dayAux] && currDateTime.getTimeInMillis() <= timeEnd.getTimeInMillis())
                    return dayAux;
                // any other case we have to turn the sound on next day
                else
                    return (dayAux + 1);
            //if it's not today return the next day with true
            if(dayAux != currentDay)
                if(v[currentDay])
                    return currentDay;

            currentDay++;
            // before go out of the bucle
            if(currentDay>=7)
                currentDay=0;
        }

        // everything false
        return -1;

And that’s all for today, probably I’ll upload the app to the market this weekend after some refactoring.

A megapromo it’s just a simple sms contest hold by any carrier or tv channel. I’m sure you have watched some ads where you can win a car sending an sms, that’s basically what we are doing. So far I’ve developed more than 10 megapromos for a lot of carriers around the world (Germany, Austria, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru…).

This whole idea is really simple, people send quite a lot of sms but that’s really out fashion so we thought let’s do it in a modern way. I’ve been leading the Android development and designing the architecture, interfaces and webservices along with my collegue from the iOS team. This is what we have designed.

The manager’s team expected something typhical but we thought “we are selling a kind of game, let’s build a game”. And so we did it. Just one screen, a slide menu and using a game based interface. Keep it simple and keep it fancy.

Below all the interface we built a RESTful webservice (PHP) which is the main responsible for all the interaction with the database. You can also find some animations in the background and in the menu (which rotates everytime you tap any icon). In the menu you can find 5 differents options:

• Settings: after accepting the legal conditions this is the first screen that comes up, you need to get a PIN for being able to participate in the megapromo. here you can set some other options such your name, city, etc.
• Ad: Shows an advertisement for the megapromo, this is also the second screen that appears after set the settings.
• Winners/Prizes: Here you can see the winners and the prizes for the megapromo.
• Statistics: Listview with all the sms you’ve sent and if the answer was ok/ko or if it’s still not confirm by the system.

That’s pretty much all, just playing like a sort of trivial, answering question by taping the right option.There’s still some graphic work going on but hopefully will be ready soon. This one it’s been developing for a megapromo in South America so it’s in Spanish. It looks better with the phone in your hand but that’s the only thing I can show you so far.

Our first app was related to a new project called Iluba, just to give you some highlights, Iluba is a Deal website, pretty much like Groupon or Google Offers but focused in Spain (they are trying to expand through Europe and South America though). We though in a simple app, with just few features for starters. Basically the main idea is gather all the offers in a listview which is updated (saving all the information related with an offer) just when you go to the offers list for the first time, we don’t want to bother the user with a lot of updating messages.

Of course we had to manage a lot of pictures in memory so best way we thought was simply load the images asynchronously under demand. I open any offer and I can’t see the real picture until it’s fully loaded but I still can navigate through the app without waiting even a second to get the picture because we already have all the offer’s information (we got it when we loaded the offer’s list for the first time).

All the information we get comes from a RPC-XML webservice which was provided by the Iluba’s team. We are still working on the payment system, so far just redirects you to Iluba’s page to fill all the information using a webview from our app. Right now the app comes in Spanish and English depending on how you have set your phone, unluckily the website is just in Spanish.

Further information in www.iluba.com (spanish only )

Finally I’ve “finished” my third song, as usual without lyrics but hopefully that will change soon because I just ordered a new SM58 for the vocals. I’ve been reading a lot about mics (I already own a ribbon mic but it’s too sensitive :S) and finally I’ve chosen the SM58, which I think is the best for my purpose.

Anyway, back to the song… I had this idea few months ago, I recorded the main idea and well… everything has changed since then, I’ve just kept the main riff but that’s pretty much the only thing that I didn’t change. I have to say that in my opinion this is the best EQ that I made till now, you can see the differences between this song and the others that I made before, just check it out!.

The most difficult part was the solo, actually I don’t like too much but I won’t change anything yet, maybe later when I record the lyrics, who knows.

By the way I’m already working in my new song which is gonna be a cover from a famous song, can’t wait to finish it.

Enjoy!

–

Bienvenidos de nuevo.

Por fin he “terminado” mi tercera canción, como siempre sin letra, pero eso cambiará pronto ya que acabo de comprar un nuevo SM58 para las voces. He estado leyendo mucho sobre micros (ya tengo uno micro de cinta pero es demasiado sensible :S) y finalmente he elegido el SM58 el cuál creo que es el mejor para mi propósito.

De vuelta a la canción, tuve esta idea hace unos pocos meses, grabé la idea principal y bueno… todo ha cambiado desde entonces, sólo he dejado el riff principal pero eso es básicamente lo único que no se ha modificado. Tengo que decir que en mi opinión es la mejor EQ que he hecho hasta ahora, podéis comprobar las diferencias entre esta canción y el resto que hice antes.

La parte más difícil fue el solo, realmente no me gusta mucho pero no voy a cambiar nada todavía, quizás más tarde cuando grabe la letra, quien sabe.

Por cierto, ya estoy trabajando en mi nueva canción, va a ser una versión de una famosa canción, que ganas de terminarla.

Disfrutad!