Announcing The Blue Alliance for Android, v2.0!

[nathanwalters]

Merry Christmas, Chief Delphi! As a special Christmas surprise, The Blue Alliance is proud to announce version 2.0 of our Android app. If you've been following the Github commit logs, you'll know we've been hard at work over the past few months on this new version. It’s a complete revamp of the previous app.

Those of you that follow Android know that Google released Android 5.0 this past summer, and with it, a brand-new design language called Material Design that’s fast, fluid, and beautiful. The Blue Alliance now offers a Material interface on all 4.0+ Android devices. We've followed the Material spec as closely as possible, so it blends in beautifully with the Android system. Check out the screenshots below for some examples of the new design.









However, this update is much more than just a new coat of paint. We're happy to announce a new service that we're calling myTBA. If you sign in to the app with your Google account, myTBA will be enabled. myTBA lets you track your favorite teams, events, districts, and more. In addition, you can subscribe to a wide variety of push notifications on all of our different models. When you register for a specific push notification, you’ll get an alert on your phone whenever that particular thing is updated. See the below list for all the supported notification types (and more are on the way!).

Events

• Upcoming matches
• Match scores
• Competition level starting
• Awards posted
• Match schedule posted

Teams

• Upcoming matches
• Match scores

Team@Event

• Upcoming matches
• Match scores

All of these are configurable on a model-by-model basis, so you have very granular control over which notifications you receive.

Because there are so many changes, we aren't pushing this to the production channel on the Play Store just yet. We're releasing this on the beta channel, and over the next week or so we'll be wrapping up any loose ends and taking into account any feedback and bug reports from the beta testers; we'll be aiming for a full release on kickoff! If you’d like to join the beta group, here’s the link: Beta testing group.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed code, bug reports, and feedback! As always, if you have some coding experience and would like to contribute, check out our Github repo here: Github repo. We're especially in need of iOS devs to help get the iOS app complete.

Again, Merry Christmas! We hope you enjoy a brand new TBA experience.

[plnyyanks]

Hope y'all enjoy the app! We're pretty excited to run the push notification system through its paces this year, and we're working on building up an API so that everybody can tap into the datafeed to build their own awesome apps.

As always, if you find some bugs with this, please create an issue on our GitHub page. And if you know a thing or two about Android (or want to learn, we're happy to teach), stop over the repo and submit a pull request!

[Steven Donow]

dat hamburger

Any plans for Android Wear support? Maybe just a simple browser with team, rank, next match, etc...

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

dat hamburger

Any plans for Android Wear support? Maybe just a simple browser with team, rank, next match, etc...

What do you think would be the best way to interact with wear? We can send notification over with some special actions maybe (even that, what actions would be good?).

It's been on our list, but we haven't been sure how to implement it well, so we're open to suggestions.

And since Pebble just added support for interacting with wear notifications, I can actually test it now...

[pimathbrainiac]

Sweet! This uses the API for fetching information, correct? I tend to look at code from the TBA Android repo when I'm stuck with code for CDBot (although I haven't been stuck with TBA stuff for a while, the API is well documented).

[nathanwalters]

Yeah, we use all of the public APIs internally for fetching information. We do have a private API now for favorite and subscription managing, but that's just for security.

[Jared Russell]

Awesome!

Next, I want a Google Now card

[nathanwalters]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Awesome!

Next, I want a Google Now card

Believe me, as soon as Google opens up the Now stream to developers, we'll launch that

[Jacob Bendicksen]

Are you planning on releasing an iOS app? I'd love to have it on my iPhone.

[nathanwalters]

Originally Posted by Jacob Bendicksen

Are you planning on releasing an iOS app? I'd love to have it on my iPhone.

Eventually, we'd like to. As I mentioned in the original post, we're in need of iOS devs to finish everything. I'm not sure how far the original iOS team got.

[Jacob Bendicksen]

Originally Posted by nathanwalters

Eventually, we'd like to. As I mentioned in the original post, we're in need of iOS devs to finish everything. I'm not sure how far the original iOS team got.

Whoops, missed that part. Thanks!

[plnyyanks]

I pushed out another beta update last night - if nothing else comes up, this is what the next prod release will be. So if anybody finds any pressing issues, let me know here or on GitHub and I'll make sure it gets fixed.

[plnyyanks]

We've pushed the v2 update out to the production channel! Sweet lollipop goodness should be rolling out to everyone's devices over the next few hours.

As always, crash reports and feature requests are always nice to have.

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

We've pushed the v2 update out to the production channel! Sweet lollipop goodness should be rolling out to everyone's devices over the next few hours.

As always, crash reports and feature requests are always nice to have.

Wow, the app is beautiful! The new features work great, and I love the amount of information I can access combined with the myTBA feature.

I noticed that when I first opened the app, since I wasn't signed in, I pressed the myTBA button from the menu - this seemed to crash and close the app.

Other than that, it really is amazing.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

Wow, the app is beautiful! The new features work great, and I love the amount of information I can access combined with the myTBA feature.

I noticed that when I first opened the app, since I wasn't signed in, I pressed the myTBA button from the menu - this seemed to crash and close the app.

Other than that, it really is amazing.

Thanks for the feedback! We put a lot of time into the redesign, so it's nice to see people liking it.

I've managed to reproduce the crash you reported; it'll be fixed in the next version. You can track progress here