Introducing TimePiece, my first app on the Android Market

I am pretty excited to announce my first application is finally on the Android Market: TimePiece, a pretty little world time app (Go get it, its FREE!)

A couple of months back, after a series of disappointing searches on the Android Market, I started working on a World Clock app for Android phones. Most of the world time apps on the Market were functional but I really didn’t care for the design. The goal was to not only finally have an app I would like to use, but also really grok the Android framework. I had played with Android on and off for quite a bit while my day job remained developing iOS apps, but I figured nothing teaches you as much (by forcing you to deal with all the annoying details) like going all the way and publishing an application to the Market.

For bonus points, I have released the code for the application under the MIT Open Source License. So if you want to fork it, go for it. And if you see something you think can be done better, please let me know.

One thing I did want to ensure was that the app did not use any web API, and rather used locally stored data. This limitation forced the timeline of the project to exceed my personal deadline but I think it was worth it. The city data comes primarily from http://citytimezones.info/ but had to be massaged quite a bit to find the appropriate Java TimeZone IDs and then leverage the Joda Time library to show the correct times while respecting things like daylight savings times. The massaged data was stored in a local SQLite database that the app uses.

In the next few weeks I’ll talk about a few implementation details and my experience coming from the Flash / iOS world. In the meanwhile, if you have an Android phone, give it a shot and let me know what you think. Also please rate/comment on the app on the Market. I’d love to see the app actually be used :).

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur