Show HN: My 1st mobile app- A parasitic,anonymous,remixable img app for android
Hi, this is Yarrly - my first android app, backed up server side by a mongo & node.js backend. It’s a two-panel image generator, and quite a fun experiment in a no-login (‘anonymous’) app. You generate two panel images using photos or gallery pics, and add text, then it’s uploaded to Yarrly.com - creating an instagram-like link.
For example you create http://yarrly.com/y/4hhs6ryyq73da533d, then android intents mean that if you open that link on a device that has Yarrly, you can view the image, but then also remix it. Remixing downloads the component parts of the yarrly, allowing the new user to edit them, add new images or text, and upload again. This means you can create chains, like this: http://yarrly.com/c/4hhs6ryyq73da533d
So part of the interesting idea is that it’s anonymous, so the links are as private as you make them. Share the link on email, and you can have a nice two way conversation with a friend. Share it on twitter, and anyone who finds the link can remix your Yarrly. That’s what I mean by ‘parasitic’ - it doesn’t have any concept of users, friends or anything else; it relies on being shared on other platforms to spread.
Why was it made?
I needed to learn mobile development and android seemed a bigger challenge than iOS - also a fun challenge to try something properly in nodejs and mongo - my last project (http://vvx.io/) was a ruby/rails web app sitting on postgresql.
Why no holo theme?
Meh, wanted to do something more unique and playful. This is an experiment more than anything, so why not pirate theme?
Who made it?
I did the code, my girlfriend came up with the idea and the fantastic design. Everything was arrived at through experimentation and discussion.
Are you able to give a bit more detail on your backend stack and the reasons for your choice or technologies?
Will this stay Android only or are you planning on porting it?
So Android, (full disclosure: I've done a bit of Java, I'd rate myself as not beginner but nowhere near experienced). Android is hard to develop well for, it's activity lifecycle took a long time to get my head around, and once I hit real-world testing with different devices it was just a roller-coaster of debugging that was highly, highly challenging. Also, everyone is doing things iOS first, and that's boring. We wanted to give Android users an awesome, fun, show your friends app that was hilarious, silly and pushed things forward, even just a little.
Nodejs - I'd wanted to do something in anger with node for ages, and this was the perfect opportunity. Also no proper nosql experience, so mongo!
Full disclosure: It's on top of heroku, to save time.
Id like to say there were more deep seated reasons, but they are the most honest - try something you don't know, then just focus focus focus until you nail it.
Love to port it to iOS, of course - but that's a whole NEW learning experience. Let's see how we do android first!
I used to do just Java and knew no C or C++. Below are the references that best helped me to understand the programming philosophy of Objective-C (it's easy to learn the syntax, but why code is being written a certain way is different).
Programming in Objective-C (5th Edition) by Stephen Kochan http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/032188728X
CS193P: Developing Apps for iPhone and iPad (Stanford, via iTunes U) https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/coding-together-developin...
Do you generate the images in the app and upload it to your servers or on your server & download the image to the app?