This time I have been working on the main screen you see when launching the app. Gone is the wall of text, instead replaced with a simple dashboard style view letting you access all the main functions with a single tap.

One feature of DiscCat is the ability to go off and do an online lookup in a couple of online databases for your barcode number, to save you the trouble of having to type that information in. This feature was originally added in so that if the data happened to be available, it would save you a bit of typing, which is always good. However, recently I have been getting a lot of one star reviews on the Android market based solely on this one feature. People seem to be getting outraged that it doesn’t find every DVD they scan, or even in some cases it didn’t find any. Unfortunately I cannot respond to them as the Android Market does not provide the ability for the developer to respond to reviews, or to contact the user who left the review, or really do anything else to try and mitigate the effects of 1 star reviews. Since I can’t respond to the users directly, I figured a blog post explaining exactly why looking up a barcode is non trivial is the next best thing. The rest of the post follows the jump.
Continue reading Barcodes →

I am currently working on version 2.0 of DiscCat. There won’t be much in the way of new features, but what it will have is a whole new look. I’ll be continuing to add new posts with screenshots of the new UI as I work on it, and to kick things off here is one of the search results screen in progress.