The story of Shortyz. A crossword puzzle application for Android, iGoogle, Wave, Facebook, WebOS and the web.

1. Source Compatibility Robert Cooper Extreme

2. Background I love crossword puzzles Fled iPhone land for Android No good crossword apps 

3. Shortyz Named in honor of (and with apologies to) Will Shortz @ NYT/NPR Downloads free puzzles Can download NYT subscription puzzle

4. 1.0 Written in 2 weekends PUZ file format sucks Lots of UI issues GridView performance poor GridView/ListView have two completely different interaction models However, “Good Enough for Me.”

5. 2.0 Laptop stolen Written in about 3 weeks of nights/weekends New UI Custom rendering Custom touch handling (ugh) Cleaner Code IO, State, Controller in separate APIs.

6. Life is Good In a reasonable steady state Good feedback from users Growing if small user base

7. Other People Got an email from Pam @ Google asking for a Wave version Got an IM from Josh @ Palm asking for a WebOS version

8. Hmm… “Some people when faced with a problem think, I know, I’ll use GWT…”

9. Initial Effort Code reuse actually made this easy. Moved model code and IO code into separate packages. Made GWT Module for original code Implemented new renderer for web Took about 5 hours to get something playable

10. History Repeating Play -> Render cycle painfully slow on the DOM. Re-implemented the Web version to look more like the original Android version with MVC and bind events Performance problem solved

11. Productivity Web version (after Android code) About 16 hours Facebook Version About 3 hours (Still needs work) WebOS Version About 5 hours Binary IO painful iGoogle version Trivial

12. Productivity (cont) Wave Version Almost 40 hours Wave development is a serious PITA because you need a full deploy to make it work. There are a lot of things they don’t tell you in the docs.

13. Summary Java on “Everything but the Java Platform” Tips: Manage Dependencies. Gin is totally frackingawesome. Interesting: GWT gziped is ~ same size as Android version.

14. Links Shortyz on Android Market shortyz.kebernet.net “Shortyz Crosswords” public Wave apps.facebook.com/shortyz