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A Week on Android
We released Air Display on Android a couple of weeks ago. Here’s how it’s going so far.
First observation: Sales on Amazon’s Appstore for Android are much, much slower than on Google’s Android Market. And Android Market is in turn much, much slower than Apple’s App Store. Now, part of this may be that Air Display really shines on a tablet, a form factor on which Android hasn’t been particularly successful. (Frankly, I think this is because tablet users actually want to get things done, while phone users primarily want to make phone calls and be entertained. A glance at the top-grossing lists for iPhone and for iPad supports this.) We’re hoping some of the Ice Cream Sandwich-based tablets are more popular in the market than the current crop of Android tablets.
Second, Air Display’s user ratings are great on Android. But as expected, some Android users are absolutely appalled that we are charging $9.99 for Air Display. One user comment says, “why are you charging $10 while others charge $.99 or $1.99? don’t you think $10 is a little steep for this program? Just seems like if i wanted it i would go and find a download for it. lower the price and you might make some kind of money. you can safely charge $1.99 $2.99 or possibly $3.99 at $10 you might as well just expect little people paying for it and mostly download it elsewhere. just a tip. hope you listen :P”
Allow me to paraphrase: “Why are you people charging a reasonable price for your product, when I can get a stolen copy from a thief for nothing? If I want it and your price doesn’t work for me, I will steal it from you. Might burgle your home too. Watch yourself.”
But in general user feedback has been very positive. Our first released version had a bug that made Air Display unusable on certain devices. It was embarrassing. But once we heard about it we scrambled to release a fix within twenty-four hours. Now we have had several user comments complimenting our tech support team. That feels pretty good!
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Air Display on the Nexus 7
When we received our brand new Asus Nexus 7 tablet earlier this week, we opened it eagerly, bought Air Display and tested it on the new 7” Android tablet. We were happy to see that it not only ran without any problems, but it was much faster than on any other Android tablets that we’ve tested. It was screaming fast, even faster than the Retina iPad (of course, the new iPad has three times as many pixels as the Nexus 7).
So it was a little surprising when we started hearing from people on Twitter and via email who were unable to purchase Air Display for their Nexus 7. They were either not finding Air Display at all in Google Play on the device or they were seeing that it was incompatible on their computer.
So that was weird. We didn’t see any problem on our end. But then a few hours later, we started seeing the same thing. We double-checked our Google Play Portal and confirmed that it said Air Display was compatible with the Asus Nexus 7.And now today it’s just fine again.
We still don’t know what was wrong, but we suspect it was sloppy cache synchronization on Google Play. But it’s all working now! -
Pro Tips for Awesome Siri Dictation
Although Air Dictate is no longer available, we did get something out of the project. And not just a reserve of reusable code, like the graphical computer picker that we later used in Air Login. We also learned a lot about using Siri for dictation on the iPhone.
Besides the obvious conversion of spoken words into text, Siri dictation also features a wealth of secret commands that you can employ to do rich spoken text entry. For example, you probably already know you can speak the word “period” at the end of a sentence. If you say…
“hello period good day period”
…the resulting text will be “Hello. Good day.”
But there’s a lot more. Here you go. Enjoy it in good health.
Cap or Capital capitalizes the next word: “his name is cap mark” -> “His name is Mark”
Caps On and Caps Off are for titles: “check out the caps on air display caps off app” -> “Check out the Air Display app”
All Caps, All Caps On, All Caps Off capitalize all letters: “are you all caps crazy or is it all caps on just me all caps off” -> “Are you all CRAZY or is it JUST ME”
No Caps, No Caps On, and No Caps Off disable auto-capitalization: “the white house is a no caps on white house no caps off” -> “The White House is a white house”
Space Bar inserts a space. It can also prevent auto-hyphenization: “the bug space bar infested the bug-infested pond” -> “The bug infested the bug-infested pond”
No Space, No Space On, and No Space Off let you run words together.
New Line starts the following text on a new line (inserts one return)
New Paragraph begins a new paragraph (inserts two returns)
Begin Quote and End Quote (or Quote and Unquote) for “double quotes”
Begin Single Quote and End Single Quote for ‘single quotes’
There are also a quite a few special characters. Here’s what you say to produce a variety of punctuation, symbols, and other characters
- ~ tilde
- ! exclamation point
- @ at sign
- # pound sign
- $ dollar sign
- % percent sign
- ^ caret
- & ampersand
- * asterisk
- = equal sign
- + plus sign
- ÷ division sign
- - minus sign
- ± plus or minus sign
- | vertical bar
- / slash
- \ back slash
- µ micro sign
- ™ trademark sign
- © copyright sign
- ® registered sign
- § section sign
- ¶ paragraph sign
- ¢ cent sign
- ° degree sign
- £ pound sterling sign
- € Euro sign
- - hyphen
- – dash or en-dash
- — em-dash or hyphen
- _ underscore
- … ellipsis
- ( open parenthesis or left parenthesis
- ) close parenthesis or right parenthesis
- { open curly bracket or open brace
- } close curly bracket, close brace
- [ open square bracket
- ] close square bracket
- < open angle bracket
- > close angle bracket
- . period
- , comma
- ; semicolon
- : colon
- ? question mark
- ° degree sign
- :-) smiley
- :-( frowny
- ;-) winky
