You can quote me on that.

I’m developing a mobile application that displays a famous quote and allows the user to share it. I’ll use an iterative approach that builds up the application over time; my personal version of Scrum. Start out with a simple application with a  limited set of canned quotes and grow out from there. 

I’m starting out with Android. Android open source development is much easier and cheaper than iOS or a Windows phone. The biggest issue I find with Android is version support. Android has gone through significant changes over the last few years. For example the popular ActionBar was added to Android 3.0 (API level 11)  two years ago.  I’d like my application to support Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread (API level 10) and above. I found that widget settings on an Android 2.3.7 device didn’t work the same as on an Android 4.2 emulated device. Picking the version sweat spot is something that you always need to keep you eye on.

The first version will be an Android application with a simple view and associated widget. My first version includes only the very basics:

• An Activity with a TextView.
• A widget with a TextView and ImageView.
• A static string containing a quote.

Here are couple of screen shots from an Nexus emulation.

This home screen contains the Quote of the Day widget.

Quote of the Day application.

Samsung Developer has a nice emulation application available from their Remote Test Lab. I comes up much faster than AVD and comes with the skin. The only downside I’ve found so far is that it will only run for a predefined period of time.

The code is available at GitHub.