Read the Tea Leaves Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

I recently open-sourced two of my Android apps – App Tracker and Chord Reader. You can find the code on GitHub.

I open-sourced them for very different reasons, although the catalyzing events were similar. In both cases, I had a request from a fellow dev for more information about the app, which made me question why I was keeping it closed-source in the first place. And in both cases, I couldn’t find a good reason to keep the code private.

But in a broader sense, the two apps mean very different things to me. App Tracker was a project that I poured a lot of effort into, but which turned into an unmitigated failure, with only 294 active users (and less than 4,000 downloads) after almost two years on the Android Market. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit now, but at the time I was writing it, I actually thought App Tracker would be my ticket into doing freelance app development as a full-time gig – hence the laughable premium version. Ultimately, though, the app suffered from bad design and bad marketing (can you guess what it does from the name and icon?), and it never really took off. So in this case, opening up the source means acknowledging my failure and cutting my losses. It’s a humbling moment.

Chord Reader, on the other hand, was an app that I barely put any effort into, and against my expectations became pretty successful, with over 35,000 downloads (and 10,000 active users) after about a year. It’s even made me a modest amount of money from the AdMob campaign (about $100), although I put in the ads more out of curiosity than anything. I never really found the time or interest to keep maintaining this app, though, so it ended up becoming something of a neglected stepchild to me. There were lots of requests for new features (autoscroll, set lists, bluetooth integration), but for some reason I just couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to implement them. So in this case, opening up the source means releasing my app to the community, where hopefully it will find more dedicated contributors. It also means getting rid of the ads (since there’s no point in having ads in an open-source app), which I’m actually relieved to do, because they weren’t making me enough money to justify uglifying up the UI.

Of course, a lot of code gets open-sourced, and a lot of it gets lost in the abyss of endless cyberspace. There’s no point in making a big show about releasing this code without explaining a bit about why anyone should bother looking at it. So here’s my brief run-down:

App Tracker reads the system logs (“logcat”) in a background Service and notes when other apps are being launched, which allows it to keep usage statistics. It should be interesting for anyone looking to write an app to detect when a third-party app has been started (which was the question from a fellow dev that prompted me to open-source it). For instance, all of the various “protect my apps with a password” security apps use this technique. Be forewarned, though: these methods are faulty, given that the Android OS treats with suspicion any Service that tries to run 24/7, and may kill your Service without warning.

Chord Reader reads chord charts downloaded from sites like AZChords.com and UltimateGuitar.com, parses the text, and displays information about the chords, including various guitar fingerings. The most interesting part is the system of regexes (really, a grammar) to parse the chords and determine, for instance, that “Abmaj7” and “G#M7” both mean the same thing: “A-flat, major quality, 7th added.” A good place to see this in action is the unit tests. Music geeks should get a kick out of it. And of course, anyone who just wants to contribute to the project (like the dev who first contacted me and suggested open-sourcing it) is welcome to create branches and pull requests on GitHub.

Oh, and in case I haven’t made it clear elsewhere, when I open-source something on GitHub, please assume that the license is the WTFPL license, or some other very permissive open-source license. I honestly don’t care what you do with the code, although hopefully you’ll be nice about it and give me credit. Happy coding!