BabyAge Widget/App Launched

About a week ago I took a few days to make a widget. I remember when I was at google, and a co-worker said “oh yeah you can add that as a widget” and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what a widget was, and how to add it!

My widget is called “BabyAge” and it simply shows you what your baby’s age is in whatever format you like best.  (Days) and (Weeks and Days) are trivial, but anything involving months get a bit hairy.  If someone is born on January 31st, how old would they be in months and days on March 1st?  Many algorithms/calculators online give you some approximate month number, based on a 30 day month, but if you want to be exact with days as well, it is pretty tricky.  I don’t even really know if there is an accepted standard–I sort of just implemented what made sense to me. So my widget would display (1 month, 1day).

The funny thing about the Android market, or I guess any app market, is that people really like to give you bad ratings and not tell you why.  I received a wide spread of 1-5 star ratings, making me wonder if my widget was displaying the wrong age or was not loading properly.  But I highly suspect that there are people who install it expecting an app, and then can’t find it in the Launcher, so give it 1-2 stars. So then I added an app component!

But then again, there was someone who gave it three stars and said “more colors would be nice.”  I’m sorry, maybe you should just write down everything you ever wanted, and I could try to make it happen for you, for free.

Being the recipient of ratings had made me think about what makes for a fair rating.  I think anything that force-closes, doesn’t do what it says it’ll do, looks terrible, or is genuinely difficult to use warrants a low rating.  But if everything is as expected with respect to the description and screenshots, I don’t think it’s fair to give it a 1-2 star rating.  What would really be helpful and not piss a developer off is to give a 4 star rating and say, hey this is a good start–it would also be really nice if it also had this feature.

Complaints aside, it’s nice to work on little projects like this one, though someone did ask me if I was planning on having a baby soon, because I got very “into” the wedding industry right before I got married.  If you have an Android phone, give it a shot (and/or a good rating), or if you know friends with a baby and an Android phone, maybe they’d be interested. I think it’s neat for always knowing exactly how old babies are. I assume that parents care about these things.

QR Code:

Advertisement