This Android App provides a fully functional blog interface for Michelle Malkin’s blog. It supports several ways of listing posts, a way to Star posts you like, post viewing, comment viewing, comment posting as well as new post notifications. A number of configuration options allow you to tweak text and image sizes as well as set the notification check frequency or completely disable them.

The primary benefit from the app is a much cleaner and very intuitive user interface (have you tried to read blogs for any length of time on any mobile browser?) that is themed for the site. It is also much more efficient since the app is not requesting fully rendered pages but instead requesting data via xmlrpc – so the response on the app is much faster than rendering and pulling an entire page. It also has to potential to reduce server load (theoretically – if enough people switch to using the app instead of the browser).

To give it a try, search for ‘Michelle Malkin’ in the android Marketplace. Alternatively, you can just scan the barcode shown above with your phone.

By the way, if you are running WordPress and are interested in an app like this for your site, feel free to contact me for a quote and timeframe.

…especially when you live in Colorado since there is just too much to do.  Work has been busy, blogrescue stuff has been busy plus throw in a few vacations and most weekends out and about and thus no blog posts.

The good news is I’m very close to releasing my first Android app which provides a direct interface to a high profile blog.  I’m hoping this is the first of many, now that I’ve got a mechanism to quickly get data from Wordpress.  Just a bit more spit and polish and we can load it up on the Marketplace.

Since getting an Android phone, I’ve been installing (and uninstalling) lots of different apps. The creativity and variety is fantastic and the way the phone works with Google maps is incredible. But I still haven’t found the app I’m looking for.

I’m a backpacker and although GPS is a wonderful thing, you really need to couple it with a set of good Topo maps to make it useful when you are on the trail. Oh, and no cell service – the maps have to be locally stored on the device. Getting maps is not difficult – the USGS offers free downloads of the entire US (download here). These are extremely high quality maps which also makes them very large files – some approach 15MB for a single 7.5 minute square.

The app I want uses the phone’s GPS to show me where I am on a USGS Topo map. It should be able to zoom in and out (within reason) and it should not kill the phones memory, which means smaller map segments tiled in the same way the Google maps does.

Right now I’m just sketching out ideas on how to pull it off. Oh and I guess I should finish learning how to program in Android too.