It all begun last weekend when I was hiking up Mt Defiance. I brought my Android G1 device to play with the awesome My Tracks application, and also used it to take some photos.
The G1 camera takes decent pictures (except it doesn't filter UV light well). Unfortunately, getting the photos off your phone and into your web album is not as easy as it should be - you either need to upload through to a computer, or go through a slow UI flow uploading the pictures one by one from the camera app.
Hopefully, the camera app will updated soon to do this better. But I started thinking about short term improvements half ways into the hike. How hard can it be? Playing with the Android platform could be fun... What if I just..? By the time I got back to the car I had convinced myself to write and Android app, and that night I did.
Turns out it's not hard at all. Setting up the development environment and getting a basic app running in the emulator took less than an hour - impressive! Learning about the programing model and limitations of the framework took a little longer. I was disappointed to find out that the built in email api only allows for one attachment per email, but decided to just make the best of it since I didn't want to spend time on a work-around.
After testing the app a little yesterday evening, I decided to see what the publication process is like so I signed up for the Android Market. After spending a hours trying to properly sign, upload and test the app I clicked 'unpublish' for the last time and gave up and went to sleep. It was just one of those nights where things kept going wrong and nothing was going to get done.
Today, this appeared in my inbox:
"Hey I downloaded your photo uploader software. Was just wondering if u guys are planning to make it possible to browse the pics u wanna send . The app is pretty sweet though fellas, good job."
Huh, what's going on?! I go to the market, and there it is. Published, working, and installed by 100 people! With no recollection of how this happened, I'm happy to see the app being used. Weird things happen when staying up too late :)
The app is called Photo Mail Uploader and is available for free in the Market and described as follows:
Crude application that provides a basic streamlined UI for sending new camera photos as emails.
Due to limitations in the Android platform, you still can only send one photo at a time, but it's faster than using built-in camera app.
Useful for sending multiple photos to a friend or to your Picasa email upload drop box.
Looking forward to feedback and hope people will find it as useful as I do!
2009-07-23 update: The app now has "1000-5000" downloads. http://www.nd.com.cn (en) wrote to say they might translate it to Chinese.
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Note: The project is hosted on http://code.google.com/p/photomailer/, including source code (license) and bug tracker. If you'd like more features, build them!
