I really wanted to create a blog showcasing my work and thoughts and so here I am writing my first post.
I am not a writer and I don't know how often I'll be updating this or even what topics I'll be writing about but at least its a start and hopefully it'll bring good. Right let's begin. I was very much into technology ever since I can remember , and by seventh grade I was sure of one thing , I was going to be a computer engineer when I grew up. It was three years ago when I travelled to Sweden when I felt like learning Android and how to build apps. It was vacations then so I had a lot of free time. I fired up Eclipse (Android IDE used before Android Studio) to learn all by myself with no prior knowledge of anything. I looked at the Google tutorials and quite foolishly tried following them. In the end , I kind of failed and realized I wasn't ready yet. A year later in Sweden again , for my vacations I searched around on Google for something to create apps without programming knowledge. And so I found appinventor by MIT. Everything was tied to gmail and completely free. All projects were done in the web browser window. It was a good start. I bought the google developer license almost immediately after. I used it for quite some time. Now this was a drag and drop type software. So no coding was required. I also found B4A (Basic4Android) around this time. By the time I returned to Pakistan following the ending of my vacations I had published two games (Spaceduel and GG vs BG) on the playstore. Now the PlayStore market is very competitive and so my poorly made games obviously had no chance of succeeding. Secondly app inventor was quite limited and there was no official way of integrating ads in the apps made using it (except very few). Following a number of low ratings , I ended up unpublishing both games. Its getting long I know. B4A was a good alternative since it required very little programming knowledge , was easy to use and a little more "professional" than appinventor. I discovered it at the same time as appinventor but the only problem was that the full version had to be purchased to upload apps made using it to the PlayStore. I found it expensive though and so continued with appinventor. Back in Pakistan , looking at their website I saw them offering a 50% off on the software. I bought it and started using it. Now this was probably the start of my programming journey. I used it a lot. Experimenting trying to make games and apps. Soon I was able to create a very early version of my Proximity app. I was happy. I had ads integrated and although I wasn't getting revenue it was a good start. The reviews came in and I updated the app constantly adding new features and refinements. It was only at the beginning of this year that as I tried updating the app , it wouldn't work. Turned out the current version of my software didn't support the latest Google apis and so I was in trouble. This was when I found Android Studio and again with very less programming knowledge went head on to recreate the app from scratch in Java. Phew! I am still a beginner and although I have better knowledge now and use the official software for Android development I know there is a long way to go to become an expert. I want to be really good at programming in two years for now. That's my goal. Well guess this is it, need to study Physics now , out..............
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