This is an interesting time of the school year, as the semester dies down but finals haven’t started yet. It’s a point in time where students have a pocket of free time, and over the weekend I spent some time making adjustments to some apps to make them look nicer or work better.

Launch on Boot –

I have improved some of the branding for the app, making the logo better illustrate the fact that there’s some Android app and it is related to restarting. Additionally, I was playing around with Android TV’s Onboarding library (which I had incorporated last summer). I’m no artist, but I did create a pleasantly designed onboarding experience for the app.

 

SubChannel –

A few months ago I built this Reddit to Live Channels app, SubChannel, and released it into the wild for people to test. I cleaned up some of the UI this weekend. Instead of clicking on a button to edit or add options, which was not very intuitive, I have placed every Subreddit into a list on the main layout. Another feature is around suggestions, where the app can suggest video-heavy subreddits that you can add to your channel lineup. I also fixed a few bugs.

Enterprise Wi-Fi –

I originally built this app because I needed a way to connect my Android TV to my university’s Wi-Fi. Yet I’ve been thinking about some other neat related applications. When you’re at a friend’s house and you want to connect to their Wi-Fi, it can often be a painful experience. There’s already a solution: QR codes. There’s a standard for encoding Wi-Fi networks into these blocks and then reading them to connect.

In this latest version, I added another tab to the app which allows people to use this on home networks, those that don’t use the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). They can just put in their SSID and password and a QR code will be generated so others can connect hassle-free. This could be very useful at parties. The implementation is a bit crude. It doesn’t pull from what network you’re connected to, and it doesn’t save your password for later events. Still, I can see this being helpful for a much wider audience.

Conclusion

These kinds of simple proofs-of-concept are neat, and show the potential of what is possible on a TV. It can be tough to manage time across all of them, but they’re all open source, allowing others to take up the mantle for the project or just a feature. If you’re interested in joining these projects, let me know.