d20 Ability Calculator for Android
I just released my second application for the Android platform, called d20 Ability Calculator for Android. Just in time for your weekend gaming session 
It is again a tool to scratch a personal itch: while I like the ability point buy system for Dungeons & Dragons that I first saw with the 3rd Edition, for some reason it has always been annoying for me to calculate the ability scores that way. Especially when your campaign allows for lots of points, like we used in the Dead of Winter campaign. This application makes it easy:
d20 Ability Calculator for Android 1.0 screenshot
The d20 Ability Calculator does not aim to be a full character generator. There is the venerable desktop application PCGen for that, although the learning curve to be able to use PCGen is pretty steep. But the Android application is a quick and easy helper when you don’t (or can’t) deal with PCGen and want to quickly create a new character. And let’s face it, you just about always will have your phone with you, which can’t be said about your laptop (even if you have one). There are already several dice applications available, so you can gather quite an arsenal of role playing utilities and tools for Android.
I was quite surprised that there does not appear to be anything like this available for the iPhone in the appstore: search for d20 with appshopper. You can use Cyrket and androidstats to keep track of how this application is doing in the Android Market:
From programming point of view the application presented some new challenges for me to overcome. I needed to launch the configurator Intent and inform the main calculator when that was done. The landscape layouts are also significantly different from portrait, which was not the case with the previous application. I became a fan of Toast, and will definitely consider using something similar for my other, non-Android applications as well. I also feel like I am slowly becoming a better Java developer. I still feel like my beginner Java skills are still the biggest hindrance in me getting anything done quickly on Android. Oh, and I definitely need to get better at making icons, and using custom buttons, backgrounds and so on to make esthetically pleasing applications.
I did the initial checkin on February 22nd, but didn’t really start working on it until March 1st. After that I spent probably 4 hours per evening, 6 days a week on it. So about 50 hours total I’d say.
There are lots of potential improvements and new features, but I’d like to get some user feedback first to see on which areas I should concentrate first. Drop me an email or leave a comment, and enjoy!
premier team international:
good job! looks like a good app. thats weird that the iphone doesnt have and app like that even with their 75k+ apps on the market right now.
January 18, 2010, 1:55 pm