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.