We just released a new version for all our tool apps including Advanced Tally Counter, Advanced Ruler, Advanced Protractor, Advanced Bubble Level and the corresponding Pro versions. Other than some bug fixes, the main purpose of the release is to support tablets and make them working better on Android 3.1 and 3.2. All graphics are recreated to support high resolutions on tablets. They look really good. Please check them out.
Category: Utilities
We just redesigned our Advanced Tally Counter (Pro) to support higher resolution such as tablets. Here is the new design. Hope you will like it. You can find screenshots for both tablet and phone below.
Advanced Tally Counter: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.yingwen.counter
Advanced Tally Counter Pro: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.yingwen.counterpro
Out of topic: we released 3.0 version yesterday evening but due to our ignorance of the obfuscation complexity, we didn’t catch a force close that is only happening on the released apk files. During the night, we received a lot of emails, market comments and bug reports on this issue. We quickly fixed it and released 3.1 to fix the issue. One one hand, we feel extremely sorry for missing the force close at the first place. On the other hand, we are glad to find out (in a bad way) there are so many people who are using this app actively. Thank you all for your support!
Square Footage Master is a must-have app for realtors, house buyers, and contractors who need to measure houses, yard or office square footage (or square meters). You can get an accurate result without using any other tools. No tape ruler? No problem. The app comes with a camera ruler (as the one in the Advanced Ruler Pro app) and a body ruler that are very easy to use. It will also save the measurement to the memory card or you can send it to yourself or someone else by email.
Preparation:
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You can use the app with a tape ruler or a laser ruler. But the true convenience comes from the built-in camera ruler and the body ruler. In order to use these two rulers, some preparations are required.
The above screenshot is the home page of the app. Before using it, please click on the “SETTINGS” button on the home page.
For the camera ruler, you need to measure two values and input to the settings. First, it is the camera height. When you use the camera ruler, you stand straight and hold the phone at the height such that the camera is at your eye height. We need to know the camera height. Secondly, it is the camera to wall distance. Usually you lean against the wall when you take the measurement, which means the measured length is from the camera to the other wall. However what you need is the wall-to-wall distance. If we know the camera-to-wall distance, we can automatically add it to the measured length which will give you the wall-to-wall distance. For both values, you can lean against a wall and ask someone using a real tape ruler to measure the camera height and camera-to-wall distance then input to the settings page.
It is a good idea to use the body ruler when the measured distance is not on the ground (such as counter top size) or or it is too short (such as a hallway width). So please take the time to measure the different body dimensions. For example, to measure the step length, you can put a tape ruler flat on the ground, starting the tap head, walk normally for 5 steps, take the reading then divide it by 5. This will give you a more accurate step length.
Usage:
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You can click on the “Start a whole house measurement” to start a new project. It will bring you right to the room measurement page.
You give the room a name, specify the room category (level 1, 2 or outside or non-living area, we will use it to give you square feet for different category), then you can use the camera ruler or the body ruler.
To use the camera ruler, tap the length on the shape you want to measure, tap the camera button, you will see the camera preview is showing. Now lean against the wall, put the camera at the eye height, tilt the phone to aim the root of the wall on the other side and tap the aiming scope. Now you will get the measurement from the camera to the other wall. Just press “Back” key on your phone, the measurement value (after adding the camera-to-wall distance) will be will be recorded. To use the body ruler, tap the length to measure, tap the body ruler button, a dialog will pop up asking you how many steps or hand spans or strides. Choose the body ruler you prefer and type in the number. You can use decimal, such as 2.5 hand spans.
If you already knew the length using other types of ruler, just tap the edit box and enter the value. You can input things like “1 1/8 ft”,”5.3 m”,”138 cm”. No matter your default unit setting is U.S. or metrics, we will convert them to your default unit.
On the room measurement page, you can select different room shapes. The shape diagram will tell you which lengths to measure in order to calculate the area. You can flint left or right to choose a different shape.
Once all required lengths are recorded, you will see the area above the shape diagram. Now just press DONE button to go back to the room list page.
On room list page, you can click on the ADD button to add another room. After you finish all the rooms, press DONE, it will prompt you to save it. You enter a unique name for this measurement (such as the address of the house) and the measurement will be saved.
Again on the room list page, you can click on the top title where it says Total Living Area to change to a different category. For example, you want to find out the total living area on the second level, just click on the title, select “Living Area – Level 2″, the total living area of level 2 will be displayed. You can also do it for all the yards or non-living area etc. However in order to use this feature, you need to specify the category for each room when you take the measurement.
Go back to the home page, you can click on the “Open a whole house measurement” to see any measurements you saved. They are sorted alphabetically. Single click on the measurement will take you to the room list page. Long click on it will bring up a menu to choose actions such as “Delete”, “Rename”, “Send”.
On the home page, there is also a button called “Measure one room”. If you just want to measure a room without saving, you can use this button. The screen is the same as the measure a room page except it doesn’t have a cancel button.
Already eager to give it a try? Get your android phone and download it from Android Market. Here is a QR code for your convenience that will lead you right to the Android Market link of Square Footage Master.
If your country doesn’t support Android Market yet, you can pay $2.99 to yingwentech@gmail.com using PayPal and we will send the apk file to your email.
We just post updates to Advanced Ruler (Pro), Advanced Protractor (Pro) and Advanced Bubble Level (Pro) to fix the compatible issues with Android 1.5 and 1.6. Please give them a try if you are on those firmware versions.
[Developer's talk]
We used to support all levels but in the last update to fix the camera preview issue on Galaxy S, we broke the compatible because we used a Android 2.1 only method. Because of that, Android 1.5 and 1.6 users would get a force close with a VerifyClass error. In a regular Java program, we just need to add a “if” statement to check the version first and only call the Android 2.1 only method if the Android version is 2.1 and later. However on Android, this workaround doesn’t work. As long as a class uses a new method, no matter it is triggered during runtime or not, a VerifyClass error will be thrown when VM tries to load it. So we end up using reflection to call the method. Not fun at all. I also noticed some publishers post different apk files for Android 1.5. This doesn’t sound like a good solution as it will force users to purchase it again when he/she upgrades its phone’s firmware. If Android market support several apk files for the same app on different Android version, it would be a useful feature.
Anyway, the good news is more and more users are moving to 2.1 and 2.2. I just found the following updates on Android developer website. Only 17% people are still on Android 1.5 and 1.6 which is considered as “old” version. The data is collected during two weeks end on December 1, 2010. No wonder no that many people complained about the compatible issues on our apps.
| Platform | API Level | Distribution |
|---|---|---|
| Android 1.5 | 3 | 6.3% |
| Android 1.6 | 4 | 10.6% |
| Android 2.1 | 7 | 39.6% |
| Android 2.2 | 8 | 43.4% |
Here is the historical distribution.
[Source: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html]
I just post updates to pretty much all the Advanced tools apps on Android market. The main fixes are
1. Fixed camera preview not working on Samsung Galaxy S phones. It affected Advanced Bubble Level Pro, Advanced Ruler Pro, Advanced Protractor Pro
2. Added market licensing checking to all paid apps
3. Use ProGuard to obfuscate all the apks to protect our copyright
4. Made no sounds by default in several apps as people complained the sounds are annoying.
5. Phone database updates for Ruler and Ruler Pro
Enjoy!
We just post an update to Advanced Tally Counter and the Pro. Now the two versions have the same features except Pro version doesn’t have Ads. The main feature we added in this update is we now save the recorded status and the timestamps when app exits. So if you exit the app and come back, the recording status of the counter and the timestamps are persisted. Enjoy!
A couple of users suggested we should make video tutorial to help people understanding our apps. So I made two simple videos to get this effort started. More videos will be added over the time. I have to confess it is not easy to make a nice video 
Measure something longer than the phone length using the screen ruler feature (for either Advanced Ruler or Advanced Ruler Pro)
How to manually calibrate the screen ruler (for either Advanced Ruler or Advanced Ruler Pro)
While I was happy to sell enough apps every day for the lunch money, it was quite a shock yesterday morning when I routinely checked in to see how many sales during the night. More than 300 copies of Advanced Ruler Pro was sold since 4am that morning (a three hour period). So I quickly googled around and found out what happened. It was Recombu who posted a review on Advanced Ruler Pro a couple of days ago, which was linked by Gizmodo that morning. Gizmodo is a very popular website for gadgets so it was quickly followed by many retweets and blogs, forming a nice rippling effect. The sales were phenomenal during the day. I checked again this morning, There are more than 1000 sales yesterday. I know the ripple will die down after a few days but it is certainly a joyful ride.
Here are some posts for Advanced Ruler Pro I found that are original in addition to the recombu and gizmodo links above.
Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5563041/advanced-ruler-pro-measures-large-distances-with-your-smartphone
Wirefresh: http://www.wirefresh.com/advanced-ruler-pro-android-app-asks-how-tall-is-that-tree/
Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/cexn2/just_happened_across_this_little_app_that_saved/
The last one is very interesting as the guy measured the same pole using Advanced Ruler Pro and a real surveying equipment. The difference is only 1.32% (25.33 ft. v.s. 25 ft.). As a matter of fact, if one puts the phone on a stable tripod like a surveying equipment does so that the phone doesn’t shake when taking the measurement, I bet Advanced Ruler Pro can produce even better accuracy.
Best Android Apps Review just listed our app Advanced Ruler Pro in their Top Android App section.
Advanced Ruler Pro takes advantage of the Android OS and it’s ability to overlay additional layers onto the camera input, allowing for the advanced ruler functionality. The app uses fairly basic geometry to calculate values of distances, heights, etc. that you see in your camera view, and it’s all done in real-time. Then, just tap the screen to take a screen capture of whatever you want to measure and record……
Read more from
http://www.bestandroidappsreview.com/2010/05/top-android-app-advanced-ruler-pro.html
I usually log in to the Android market order inbox every morning to see how the sales going. This morning, I did the same thing but I am surprised to find out there are many sales for Advanced Ruler Pro from Japan during the night. There were sales from Japan market but not a whole lot. My gut feeling tells me Advanced Ruler Pro must be mentioned by a Japanese website. After googling around, I believe I found the site.
http://octoba.net/archives/20100521-advanced-ruler-pro-android-636.html
Even though I can’t read Japanese, with Google Translate, I can tell it tries to cover all the features in Advanced Ruler Pro. Maybe I should include a Japanese version of this app. Thanks Octoba!
