Photography Assistant 1.5 released

As a holiday gift to the 16000 users of my Android App Photography Assistant, version 1.5 is finally released.
This release includes a useful new feature - select light value from scenarios. Now you can first select the category of you light scenario (namely outdoor natural light, out door artificial light and indoor), and then select your light scenario from the list of typical light scenarios. For example, you can first select the "Indoor" category and then the "Office and work areas" light scenario.
There are also some minor bug fixes in this release.

Happy holiday! Enjoy camera life!

Short update about Photography Assistant Beta

So far the feedbacks I got from users are pretty good. No major defects found. I did some testing myself, and I love the DoF calculator! (with manual exposure setting :)
It's going to be a hectic month Sept for me. I wouldn't expect new features any time soon ( I might release 1.5 with some minor fixes ). But the I already decided what to add the next release - Photography Log, which will allow you to record all exposure setting (iso, shutter speed, aperture, subject distance, GPS location and even an optional cell phone camera pic of the motif) in your log. I would hope that this will be helpful mostly for film photography beginners. The GPS location might be helpful for most digital photographers too.

Test Driven Development on Android

Although at the very beginning, TDD, especially the UI part, looked challenging on Android, now after about 90 tests and 4,5 epic stories, I am comfortably to say that Android app can be developed in a TDD fashion reasonably smooth. You just need to accept that you can't test the interaction between UI and domain model using mock framework. Then you design in a way so that such need will be reduced to minimum. Some Android API might not be test friendly, you can solve that by introducing some middle layer abstraction.

Light Meter renamed to Photography Assistant, 1.5Beta released

I am very glad to announce that Photography Assistant 1.5 Beta was just released to the Android Market.
Features:
+ Aperture priority, Shutter priority and Manual mode for exposure setting calculation
+ Auto Exposure Value (Light Meter function) using ambient light sensor
+ Hyperfocal distance
+ Depth of Field

It was renamed from Light Meter to Photography Assistant.
Please help test this Beta version.

Update about Light Meter

3 weeks from the first release, Light Meter was downloaded more than 2,400 times.
The development went smooth, I just need time. Currently I am working on adding Manual and Av mode, which is going to be release 1.1. The manual mode could be helpful for the app to work with an incident light meter.

Light Meter 1.0 released on Android Market

The release of 1.0 EAP has been getting great responses. In less than 10 days, it got 866 downloads and 11 ratings with an average of 4.5 stars. So here is the 1.0 release.
Changes
+ calibration so that it can work with different ambient sensors on different phones.
+ be able to remember settings
Two help related features pushed to 1.01
Enjoy.

One Polish comment on LightMeter 1.0 EAP

It says "Aplikacja która w przyszłości może będzie dobra, ale na razie jeszcze dużo jej brakuje."
Google translate told me that it's Polish and in English it means "Application that the future can be good, but for now its still a lot missing."
I guess this user must haven't seen the statement I put in the market: "This is an Early Access Preview version , so very premature yet."

The commenter left a rating of 2 stars which changed the 100% 5-star rating so far (5 ratings before this one)

Lesson learned: you can never go too far to manage user expectations.

Road map for Light Meter

1.0 - add calibration function so that the app can work with ambient sensors from multiple manufactures.
1.1 - add depth of field calculation
1.2 - add hyperfocal distance calculation
1.3 - add a depth of field priority mode.

Light Meter 1.0 EAP released.

Go to your Android Market and search for "Light Meter."
It's an Early Access Preview version with only very basic functions.
Give it a try and send me feedback if you would. I will really appreciate it.
Thanks!

Android UI Test note

If you are using the ant script to run the ui tests, that script only detects changes in the java code in the target and test project. The R resource file is somehow not included. If you make any change to the layout which requires some change in the R file (your IDE might be able to help you with that), if you then immediately run a simple "ant run-tests", you might get some weird error. It seems that the new layout file has taken effect while the R file has not. In this case, you need to run a "ant clean compile" in your target project and then "ant clean run-tests" in your ui test project.