I bet it has been on the market since its inception to get top of the "Compass" search list. It is a sad truth that the Android Market search ranking are highly correlated to the time you have been on the market. It's really hard to get started in a crowded area - unless you have a very viral concept/application like the all mighty "Angry Birds".
Compass is by all means a nice application, very professional. In my opinion it missed a little something though. I mean I have no real use of a compass, living most of the time in town or near town. However I like geography and I like knowing my bearings so I decided to add yet another application to the compass list of applications.
I named it "Compastic!" and its sole purpose is to tell you which direction to look at and how far are your places of interest.
Let's take two use cases:
1) I am in Paris and want to know where to look for the Tour Eiffel
2) I am lost in the forest and I want to find my way back to the car park.
I can a third one, a bit more geeky, I just want to know where and how far is San Francisco from my sofa?
That's for the basic concept. Compass doesn't do it, or at least is not that straightforward.
I skipped the Market Study phase. I didn't download the 100+ compass applications to see if one was actually providing this feature. I just decided that I could take a couple of days off my work and implement it.
I am no Android professional but I surely know my Java. I have released a few Android applications in the past. It's a hobby and WE work only. I do have quite a few more ideas, Mobile Application is such an exciting field, with countless possibilities.
Next post I will dive into the details of how I implemented Compastic!
- Domino! (a prank, half a day to build, my very first one)
- Kids Stars (some pissed off customer, there was a bug, has left me with the dreaded 1 star, and a terrible rating)
- and Compastic! of course
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