Calendar Apps

A long time ago, I used a roundabout way of adding events to a users Google Calendar, which in turn, displays these events in Android's native calendar. A great man by the name of Sandeep Rohil gave me the idea of creating apps that add all the public holidays and so forth so people (especially ones that are new to the country and culture) would know whats coming up and more importantly, if they have to go to work or not tomorrow!!!

Now this is back in the Eclair days, so the API was still in puberty, but you'd still assume that there was some sort of functionality for adding stuff to the calendar, I mean it sounds so obvious, right???
Well long story short, there wasn't. But there was an "exploit" which was pretty much a case of guessing the schema of a database you couldn't see and then throwing data at it and then staring at the calendar in the hopes that something, if anything appears!

To put it bluntly, every version of Android on pretty much every phone has slight differences in this regard, of which are impossible to know without having the actual phone in my had. I tested on every phone I and my friends had, but what am I supposed to do about those exclusive Verizon American phones all the way across the water?

Short answer: nothing...

I made a test app to make sure it worked on the customers phone before handing me their precious €0.99 but everyone pretty much ignored it and just bought the apps outright, only to find out first hand whether it worked or not.

As you can see, the reviews were completely hit and miss... And in this world we live in, any form of bad reviews can kill an app, which it sort of did.

Anyway! Fast forward to today (or last year at this stage :S) and we are now living with the controversial version known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
When I read the release notes for this version, one bullet point stuck out like a sore thumb: "Calendar functionality added". The features that I strived so long for, were finally available to me, but more importantly, to the rest of the world too...
I had assumed that everyone and their mother would be finally sinking their teeth into these features and ripping my app off left right and center (whether they knew about it back then or not).

Much to my surprise though, I couldn't find anything on the market after a year of the API being released! So I buckled up and and remade the whole thing! I even went down the road of creating my own Android Library project that does all the work so any specific calendar app I release will have 0 code, no java whatsoever, but Ill talk more on that another day because it's too important to stick on the end of this!!!

So! if you're interested, you can pick up the app here and I'll go a bit more in dept about the disgusting innards next time!!!