Apps museum

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Here you can find all my retired apps. Working with mobile devices for 5+ years now, things change fast - some platforms I've been working on are already obsolete; some development environments that were on the top of the charts few years ago are in the rear view mirror... take mobile flash for example. Once red-hot APIs such as Google Latitude, where developers like me invested weeks and months and put out apps that use them, are now long gone.

Thus as time passes, some apps need to be retired into this glorious app museum, and no longer available for the public. Here are my apps that went there.

 

Mailtalk

Yes this my very fist app, that gave my company it's name - "talking mail". Its purpose was to convert emails to voice, and I actually had an audio streaming server running on the Internet vine, getting the email text provided by mailtalk client and returning the audio file or an audio stream. This was the very first Blackberry text-to-voice app, and the only one for few long years. The app was sold for $20 at the store, as I needed to cover the streaming expenses. I actually had few dozen purchases for it. Nowadays, whatever your app does it cannot be more than $0.99.. or better yet free with ads. 

 

Latitude Update

Dear Google, thank you for this API! This app was my best seller for the better part of about 3 years. Around mid-2011 this API was shut down, and rendered my app useless, I had to take it off. Many other developers suffered the same fate. First developed for Blackberry, then Android and last for iOS, I had few good thousands of downloads and some grateful reviews - my app was the very first Blackberry and Android Latitude client. It's purpose was to  send location updates from the device GPS to Google Latitude service at any interval you selected, and then retrieve it and view any specific location you passed through.

 

Super Gmail

You can guess, this was an extension to Gmail. You could set specific ringtone for each contact, so that when new email arrives from your mom you get different ringtone to the one coming from your friend.. you could select to have the email read aloud, or just the sender name, or the title, each time you get new email. Great idea for mobile users especially when they are driving. Again, Google made it harder and harder to maintain this app by making parts of the Gmail API private, so I had to retire it.

 

Webtalk

One of my favorites. What would be more comfortable than having the webpage you are browsing being read aloud? Especially if its a long article and you are busy washing the dishes. Working on Android, this app used Google's API to fetch the html, strip the text out and read it. With 10 officially supported websites such as CNN, Fox news etc. it was quite cool. As time passed these websites kept changing .. and the app needed constant babysitting to work properly, each time a website changed. With little time to maintain it was retired.

 

Butterfly

A really cute 2d game where you had to catch a butterfly before it hits the corner of the screen ..  used to work well on old Android platforms but never had the time to update it to the latest OS versions. 

 

Picture Frame

Cool little app that flips pictures on your phone or tablet, with some nice transitions in between. Could point it to either local images or URLs. My very first Blackberry Playbook app, at the heyday of flash development platform; as the flash support was retired, so was this app.