Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog
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Announcing the QuickView for Android open source project Posted Wednesday, June 30, 2010 0 Comments
Regular readers are familiar with the saga of QuickView for Android, our long-awaited redesign of Constant Contact’s iPhone app for the Android mobile platform. It’s been a long time coming, and we know many developers and customers have been waiting for it. Today, we’re very happy to announce that it’s ready to go - but with a special, Android-themed twist. In support of Constant Contact’s new app development contest, Labs is pleased to announce the creation of the QuickView for Android open source project!
What is QuickView for Android?
“QuickView” is the name given to Constant Contact’s family of mobile applications. The first QuickView application, QuickView for iPhone, was released in November 2009. It’s since become one of Labs’ most popular projects, and has led to a flood of requests for the QuickView experience on other mobile platforms - most notably, Google’s popular Android operating system.
Labs began work on QuickView for Android - a ground-up redesign of the QuickView experience, built specifically for the Android platform - in September 2009. We announced the project publicly on this site in December, and received a lot of great ideas and feedback based on those sneak peek screenshots. We’ve been working on it ever since, and we held an internal beta test inside Constant Contact this past March from which we were able to make even more refinements.
What’s the QuickView for Android open source project?
With Labs’ first Android application ready to go, we’ve decided to embrace the open spirit of the Android platform and release the complete source to our application. We’ve licensed the application and resources under the Apache 2.0 license, which makes it free to use for almost any purpose.
Why release it as open source?
Labs is a small team at Constant Contact tasked with researching and experimenting with new technologies. We’re big fans of the Android platform, and are pleased to have the opportunity to share what we’ve made in hopes of fostering the creation of more great Android software.
More specifically, the creation of this project will serve a few purposes:
* It opens up development of QuickView for Android to all Android and Java developers, not just the Labs team. We believe this will lead to a better and more functional app over time.
* The source provides some great, real-world examples of how to integrate a mobile device application with Constant Contact’s RESTful web services APIs. Developer Challenge contestants take note!
* The source shows solutions to a number of more general Android development problems - problems we’ve covered here in past posts like the ones on ViewSwitcher, XML parsing, and our developer resource roundup.
Yeah, okay. So how do I install it?
Like many other open-source Android applications, installation can be a bit tricky if you aren’t a developer. We haven’t provided an installable .apk (Android app file), because this app isn’t an official Constant Contact application, and we are not providing official support for it. So, if you’d like to get it up and running on your own Android device, you’ll need to set up a development environment and build the source. Please read the project README at SourceForge for more information.
I have an Android phone, but I’m not a developer. What’s Labs doing for me?
We’re really excited to see where this open source project will go - hopefully it’ll lead to a bigger and better Android application than Labs alone could’ve built!
That said, we know that this announcement probably isn’t what you were looking for as a current Droid or Nexus One owner. Fortunately, Labs has been separately working on a third entry in the QuickView family that we think will make lots of mobile device users on lots of different platforms very happy! We’ll have more to say about the future of QuickView in the first week of August, so stay tuned to ctctlabs.com and @ctctlabs on Twitter!
The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms
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