I posted my first for-pay app to the Android Market yesterday. It’s something I wrote because I couldn’t find anything like it. It’s very simple, and the point of it is to simply track one’s spending within weekly and monthly budgets.

I have tracked, using a spreadsheet, my disposable income for at least five years. I used to take out my weekly budget in cash every week, but now I work at home and so most of my spending is online via credit cards. I wanted something that would let me track how much of my budget I had left and tell me how long I had to stretch that money.

My first thought was to produce some sort of thin, credit-card-sized device that would do it, but I realized that would be too time consuming and expensive. Instead, I wrote this simple Android app. After all, I pretty much have my phone with me at all times, so I’d never be far from entering my expenditures.

I hope that there are people out there that have a similar need and are willing to pay $1 to have that need met. The first 24 hours have not been promising, but in the end I have an app that I like, and I guess if people eventually try it and decide they like it as well, it’ll be a little extra spending cash for me.

I made a simple site for the app: SpendingCash

Would this sort of thing interest you? Why or why not? Do you think it’s worth $1?

It is available on the Android Market and the Google Code project page.

Improvements include louder bell sounds, automatic volume maximization, smarter handling of the onscreen keyboard and the text input fields. I also improved the icons in the app to meet the Android guidelines.

Just uploaded, you can download the APK here. I think I’m going to release this one on the Android Market as well.

I fixed an outstanding screen rotation bug, made it so that vibrate mode applies to both the bell and the ringtone, and upgraded to the Android 1.5 (Cupcake) API.

I recently learned of the Blueprint CSS framework, and wanted to apply it to a project I’m doing for work. However, I needed something simpler to try it in first, so I used it to design a new WordPress theme for this blog. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but it wasn’t really a priority.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and Blueprint made it easy to get the layout right without hours of CSS fiddling. I’m not a CSS expert by any means, so often hours of fiddling are unavoidable if I need to do some complicated CSS.

For comparison, here’s an archive of what the old theme looked like:

I still want to theme the comments at some point, to get the Gravatars bigger, but it’s not a high priority. That aside, what do you think of the new theme?

Inspired by this blog post by Tim Ferriss and the letter “On the shortness of life” by Lucius Seneca contained therein, I created a “death stats” script to help remind me to make good use of the time that I have left.

Of course, I could die in a car accident any day, but we have to think of these things practically and probabilistically.

The script runs in Bash — you’ll need a Mac or Linux machine, or Cygwin on Windows I suppose, in order to run it. I have it running on my webserver and emailing me each morning via a cron job. The math should be pretty self-explanatory, and you could easily add your own metrics. Note that I’ve changed my exact birth date for the posted script here, since in some situations that could be considered confidential information.

The estimated death date I got using the “Normal” mode of the Death Clock.


#!/bin/bash
# Prep
# YYYYMMDD
BIRTHDATE="19820301"
DEATHDATE="20570127"
DAYSPERYEAR="365"
SECONDSPERDAY=$((24*60*60))
SECONDSLEFT=$((`date -d $DEATHDATE "+%s"`-`date "+%s"`))
SECONDSTOTAL=$((`date -d $DEATHDATE "+%s"`-`date -d $BIRTHDATE "+%s"`))
# There's probably a nicer way to format the percentage but this works
PCTOVER=`echo "scale=2; (($SECONDSTOTAL - $SECONDSLEFT) / $SECONDSTOTAL)*100" | bc | sed "s/\.00//"`
DAYSLEFT=$(($SECONDSLEFT / $SECONDSPERDAY))
YEARSLEFT=$(($DAYSLEFT / $DAYSPERYEAR))
# Output
echo "Percent Over: $PCTOVER"
echo "Days Left: $DAYSLEFT"
echo "Years Left: $YEARSLEFT"


The output looks like this (the numbers are made up):

Percent Over: 29
Days Left: 19002
Years Left: 51


I do hope and think it reasonably likely that Ray Kurzweil is right, and that my life could be substantially extended, but I’m not counting on it, and I don’t think I should — it would kind of defeat the purpose here. Read the letter by Seneca in Tim Ferriss’ post to see what I mean.

Suggestions for improvements to the script are welcome.

NB: This doesn’t work on OS X, because the date command is different.