Hello everyone, I hope admins will forgive my selfish self promotion in my second post, but I think that my work might be of interest to members of this community. Now, to the point. I am the author of SilverBug, an application for Android powered smartphones, and I'd like to present it here. It so happens that I am also into precious metals and coin collecting and decided to combine my interest in silver coins with my passion for coding. SilverBug is the result of this and was created in my spare time. SilverBug aims to be a handy reference for people interested in silver bullion coins. It contains detailed information on the 10 most popular coins, includes full specifications, mintage figures and high res photos. It also allows you to specify which coins you own, so you can have a grip on your collection and it's value. The coin photos presented by SilverBug are big part of the application. Those were made by myself. The "high res" is a little exaggeration, it's only high in terms of mobile phones, but that's as far as I could go with compact camera and no equipment. Some screenshots: The application is constantly under development and in the future I'd like to: - have photos of all the changing designs of the various coins in catalogue. The best example comes from this forum: Silver Kookaburra Designs - this is what I'd like to achieve with my application - have more advanced price chart module, as it currently only supports range from 1 month to 3 years - provide robust coin collection management features SilverBug is available for free (contains ads) from Android Market. Features summary: - 'Catalogue' - coin information, specs, mintage figures - High resolution photos - view the coins at extreme close ups - 'My collection' - keep track of your silver bullion holdings - 'Fixings' - check current price fixings for silver - Silver price charts - see how silver price changed Hope you'll enjoy my work. Your opinions, comments and suggestions are welcome.
Thanks. Unfortunately, I lack resources and time to make an iPhone version, althouth I'd really like to do it in the future.
Could be awesome if on Apple. What sort of seed money would you need for an iPhone/iPad app? How many apps would you need to sell at 99c to be able to forego ads?
^ lol lol iphone > android but wow thats an amazing app. colors looks great. you got a buyer here if you ever make one for the iphone.
wasnt in wi fi to download. How many meg is the download? didn't want to download until I know how big it is?
Money is not that big of a problem, I could probably get a used mac mini for cheap and borrow an iPhone from a friend for final testing. The time however (or rather lack of it) is the biggest problem here. Everything I do under my "Black Dot" brand is done in my spare time as a hobby and has little commercial potential. In case of Android, the ads are the only way to recoup some of the costs of this little side project (initial market fees, server and domain fees, etc.), since Google does not support publishing of paid apps from my country. I really don't know what sales level would be good enough to drop ads, never even thought about that. And this is probably a no issue, as I don't expect an app like SilverBug could sell more then few dozen copies. The free android version has less than 200 users and I don't expect it to reach 1000 anywhere in near future. That's 11 megs if you have a high res display (480x800 and up) in your phone, little less for lower resolution displays. Now that you mention this, I guess adding an estimate in download popup would be useful to the users. I'll add that in the next version.
I'm happy to announce the update for SilverBug, which adds the most often requested feature. Which is the ability to add your own custom coins to your collection. So if you have some bullion coins not included in the catalogue, you can just add them. You can even add junk silver in any form if you like. Generic entries for silver bars and other bullion coins are included for starters. Hope you'll enjoy this update.
Is there another way i can download this app? Actually ignore this as i am thinking the problem is that i have a blackberry.
I have a part share in a mobile dev company... we could port this to the iPhone for a few grand... anyone want to get a consortium together to fund it? could make a squillion (or could be cash down the drain)... of course BlackDot you would have to agree and be one of the partners...
From my point of view, it's more likely it would end up 'cash down the drain'. This is a niche app and I can't really see much of a commercial potential in it. The few grand is probably something like half a year worth of my salary, so you can extrapolate from that. Anyway, I definitely see a lot of interest in iPhone version, so I think at some point I'll get my ass together and just do it. I have some friends that are involved with iPhone development, so maybe I should just talk to them.
