VBSteven.be

Recently I bought myself a HTC Magic phone running the Android OS. After losing about € 10-15 on mobile internet connections in the first two days I decided to switch to the new mobile service provider Mobile Vikings. They offer 1000 sms messages and 1gb data transfer for € 15/month. The first thing I noticed after the switch was the fact that there was no easy way to know how much credits/messages/data I had left on my account. I either had to call a free number or log in to the Mobile Vikings website to check my balance.

They had a public API available but nobody had written an android implementation so I decided to write one myself. After all it’s a nice way to introduce myself to the Android API. I started up eclipse, downloaded the SDK, read a little about the API and started coding. In about 40minutes I had a very basic app that downloaded the JSON data from the Mobile Vikings API, parsed it and put the remaining balance on the screen.

The days after that I implemented a settings menu where users could enter their credentials and enable/disable the auto-update feature of the app. As an introduction to Android appwidgets I tried to get a little widget working that showed the remaining credits/messages/data on the screen and I succeeded.

A few days ago I cleaned the code a little and put an early version of the app available for the users to test at http://code.google.com/p/mobilevikingsandroid/ . Please use the Issue tracker  when you encounter any issues or have feedback.

I am currently working on the next feature (the call history) so be sure to check back every once in a while for updates.