Thank You, Beta Testers!

So the secret can now be told - AdSense Dashboard has been a skunkworks project to test Google’s prototype AdSense API.

Together, we generated enough traffic to verify the production-readiness of the API; thanks for enduring the occasional downtime as we got the API ready for the masses and for its public release, and thanks to the AdSense API team for doing such amazing work under difficult time schedules and a rather large amount of pressure from me on the shape and form of the API.

This isn’t the end of AdSense Dashboard - in fact, it’s just the beginning. But for now, the limelight belongs to our API launch.

Read the complete Adsense API Announcement

If you’d like more information on the API, you’ll find the public documentation is now available. Now that we’re public, I’ll be changing the auth method from ClientLogin (which reported “AdSense” as the permissions it wanted when you attached an account) to the OAuth endpoint for the API, at which point it will tell you that it wants read-only access to the API, further limiting the set of permissible actions that can be taken by the code.

Thanks again to everyone who’s installed the product and helped us test our API.

AdSense Dashboard 2.6

I’ve been pumping out dashboard changes for the last few days, based on feedback, bug reports, and general email discussions with users. Keep them coming - if you use the app, I want to hear from you.

Users on Eclair/Froyo got bit by a pretty nasty bug in the HTTP stack built into the phone; the common fix appears to be to not use that API on those platforms, so that’s what I’m doing.

New stuff:

• Support for disabling auto-refresh.
• Bugfixes for Eclair/Froyo. If it’s not fixed for you, I want to hear about it.
• Device-specific compatibility bugfixes around currency and rounding.
• Google TV support. This is a bit slapdash - I’ll improve it as I improve the tablet layout.
• New widget (released as part of the 2.5 chain) by a contributor/coworker.

There’s a lot of activity going on this weekend and early next week; I intend to do a lot of ‘remastering’ of the numeric portion of the display to show more comparative data - today versus yesterday, today verus one week ago, this week verus last week, this month versus last month, etc., for a broader set of metrics than we currently include.

That will also be extracted into widget form - choose an arbitrary 1x1 fact.

Lifetime spend, custom channels, and url channels will also show up, in all probability.

Your feedback isn’t just welcome - it’s wanted. Ping me with your gripes, comments, suggestions, and requests.

Weathrman 4.0: By Popular Demand

I’ve got a shiny new Xoom, and now you have a shiny new Weathrman client.

The biggest changes here are all around two user stories I’ve heard more than anything else:

• I installed the app, but it doesn’t do anything and I can’t find it.
• I need more control over how the application uses data on my device.

To address the former, we’ve got a launcher, dialogs on preview, and an embedded usage guide to help the user get the live wallpaper selected on their devices.

To address the latter, we’ve now got a pretty good story on data controls:

• We now obey background data settings. If you turn off background data support, you can still refresh the wallpaper manually, but all automated, non-interactive network activity is stopped.
• Support for disabling use of 2G/3G and WiMAX networks, for those who want wifi-only.
• Control over walllpaper refresh rate.

Now that we’re allowed a lot fewer search terms, we’re doing a lot more fan-out of requests to flickr; a single user can now result in about 5,000 flickr requests, fired off in under 30 seconds. The pressure is on to find better search terms and filter terms, and so our next steps will be to take advantage of the prediction API and start using machine learning to make better decisions.

Another weekend, another update...

This weekend, I’m doing something I’ve been working on for a few weeks now, and am working on tidying up and preparing for release.

I’m a recent LOVEFiLM user - fell in love with the service fairly quickly, when Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom showed up at my door.  There are films that I haven’t seen but wanted to, but won’t go through the cost of buying on blu-ray.  There are, more importantly, games I’d like to play, but won’t buy because, quite frankly, they’re just not good enough, or probably not the kind of game I’m likely to finish.

But what I’ve found is that my interest is…  fleeting.  I know that I wanted to have seen a film when someone mentions something that triggers that memory - but unless I can do something about it right now, it’s never going to happen.

What you really want is a mobile client, oriented towards search and discovery, for helping you quickly get to (and add to your queue) films you’d like to see.

Working title was liveFiLM, but that’s a violation of their naming policy.  For now, it’s Phantoscope.

Weathrman 3.1: The Freshmaker

Lots of minor tweaks going into this.

For a long time now, doubletapping has been problematic.  I install a double-tap handler the same way anyone else would, but end up seeing events that belong to the foreground application.  Android has a mechanism for wallpapers to see only two possible gestures out of all of the ones an Android can handle: a tap, and a drop.

I’ve constructed a (very) simple double-tap handler out of the tap events sent via onCommand(), instead of installing a gesture detector, in the hopes of getting rid of these ‘false positives’ that result in the information-about-this-image dialog appearing too often.

I’ve also removed, you might be happy to hear, all analytics tracking.  Its primary use was to send back stack traces and errors back, so that I could track down client problems.  New features in the Android Marketplace for publishers means I should be getting stack traces directly in the publishing console… but I don’t, because they’re not being seen, because I’m sending those stack traces (in a much less efficient form) to Analytics.

So, analytics is gone, which will result in a better experience for all.

I’ll be pushing this onto the market shortly.