A little diary that I wrote during the development of the app.

January 18 2013
This is the second week working on a version of Amazing Slow Downer for Android.
The first week was a pain, new developer tools, a new computer language (Java, sigh...) and really difficult to write real-time C++ code which is needed to get an app such Amazing Slow Downer to run OK on Android devices.
And the simulator (emulator) is really bad comparing to the iPhone simulator. So a new Google Lexus GS 450h was needed which made everything a lot easier. I now have a basic audio player engine working.

February 1 2013
Week three and four passed by real quickly. Lots of problem to solve but now finally I have something that can decode Wave, MP3, Apple AAC, Ogg and FLAC files, slow them down and play them back fine. This took four weeks, on Apple iOS it would have taken four hours to accomplish the same thing. No wonder there aren't many apps similar to Amazing Slow Downer available for Android. Took about hundred C++ files to come this far but this is the fun thing with programming, doing the low level audio playback stuff.
The user interface needs to be written in Java and that's no fun especially since I don't know Java yet. So far the user interface consists of three buttons, "Pick a song", "Play" and "Stop" living in one Java file, I think I can live with that for another week.

February 19 2013
Now beginning of week seven and have started on the user interface. It's tricky since there is no standard screen size for Android, it could be just about anything. Doing a lot of different tests to see what works best. Hope to be able to upload a picture of the app soon.

February 28 2013
After eight weeks, the program now consists of 192 C++ files (not counting header files) and 6 (!) Java files. Now it's pure Java GUI programming left. Will probably take another month until it's available.

March 7 2013
After a couple of weeks of Java programming, the program is now starting to look as a real software and I'm beginning to see the light in the tunnel. There is still a lot to do, especially since Android lacks certain GUI controls or behaviour that Apple iOS contains and I have grown accustomed to this. I have to write some of these controls myself and that takes some time. But we are approaching the goal slowly.

March 22 2013
Another two weeks passed by real quickly. The last week has been devoted to support Windows Media Audio Files (.wma). It's only a partial success so far. I have some older wma formats working but not the most common WMA Pro format, I guess support for that will have to wait until later. Does people use WMA on the Android? My Nexus 4 doesn't support WMA even though it claims it should. Next week I will try to add the last features plus write some help files, so a first release is getting closer. Stay tuned.

March 25 2013
Finally got all various flavors of WMA files to work OK. That should be the end of supporting different file formats. Now need to implement a file browser, Android lacks that despite that it's possible to browse the file system.

March 26 2013
File browser completed.

April 2 2013
Big party tonight! "Amazing Slow Downer for Android" is finally finished!
Left is to understand how to make it available at the Android App Store (Play Store) and how to get paid for it. Will take a couple of days but hopefully the app will be available by the end of this week (or at least very soon).

April 4 2013
Amazing Slow Downer for Android version 1.0.0 is uploaded to the Android App Store (Play Store).

What happened after that?