Like most of the stuff I’ve done on android, my most recent app, “Send RSS to Google Reader” came out of being frustrated that Google’s Mobile Browser wasn’t smart enough to detect RSS feeds, and also wasn’t smart enough to allow you to subscribe to them in Google Reader’s Mobile interface, except by doing some cut-and-paste gymnastics.
The first version required that you actually display an RSS feed (or find the link to it yourself), and then use the Android Browser’s “Share this page” functionality to pass the url on to Google Reader by way of my little app. This was incredibly cumbersome.
Now, thanks to some Yahoo Pipes magic behind the scene, you can be viewing any web page, hit the ‘Share this page’ menu item, select “Send RSS to Google Reader” and it will auto-detect any RSS feeds that happen to be part of the page. If there is just one, it sends it over to Google Reader Mobile where you can subscribe with a single click. If there are more than one, you are presented with a list of them, and can click any one of them to send it over to Google Reader Mobile.
Unlike the first one, this app will be beneficial for most Android users. Like with iPhone, Android lacks Flash capabilities, and thus handles YouTube by using a stand-alone player app. When a user clicks a YouTube link, the YouTube application fires up and immediately begins playing the video, full-screen. (If you can really call a phone’s display “full-screen.”) This means you don’t have the luxury of seeing any information about the video before you play it.
My app solves this problem rather handily. Instead of sending YouTube links immediately to the YouTube app, they go through my app first, causing a popup with title, description and thumbnail image. And then a button at the bottom which will send the video to the YouTube app if you really want to watch it. If not, just hit back or the ‘ignore’ button. No more Rickrolls.
Like with my first app, this one is available both as a paid app and as a free app for the cheapskates. My logic is that the more people actually get benefit from an app, the more likely they’ll EVENTUALLY be to throw me some cash. If they have to pay upfront, very few people will even try it.
(For the interested, this logic has proven to be very, very flawed; after 48 hours in the Marketplace, the free version of youtube Sleuth has well over 1,000 users. The $0.99 version has 9, and one of those was D. (Unlike on iPhone, you can “refund” apps you don’t like within 24 hours of purchase — but the catch is you can only do it once. If you install it again you are stuck with it. I was testing it and accidentally “bought” it from myself using D’s phone one too many times.)
My first foray into Android app creation has come to fruition. NZBdroid is live in the Android Marketplace, both for $2.00 $0.99 and also COMPLETELY free. It’s up to the user whether they want to buy it or not, which seems to me to be a pretty cool way to do things.
What NZBdroid does is allow the user to click on .nzb files in the Android browser (or in any app, really) and have that .nzb file sent off to your ‘net-connected instance of SABnzbd+, where it will be downloaded and ready for you to access it when you get home.
Anyway here’s a little demo of the NZBdroid in action, clicking a link on tvnzb.com (but keep in mind, the Android emulator runs really slowly on my computer):
My first foray into Android app creation has come to fruition. NZBdroid is live in the Android Marketplace, both for 
