Monday 10 January 2011

Where To Purchase dooblou Applications, Licenses, and How They Work


Update: You can now also purchase at AndroidPIT!  It uses a similar licensing system to the Android Market, so the same advice applies.

Whenever you purchase one of my paid applications, you are also purchasing the license to use it. The application will at times try and retrieve the license to ensure you have permission to use it, and it does this by making a call to a license server using whichever data connection you have (WiFi, 3G, etc.). Most people purchase the application, have no problems at all and are very pleased with their purchase. However, some users can have trouble figuring out how to officially purchase my applications and to work out whether they have a license or not. This often happens if you think you have bought a license, but the application then tells you that you haven’t got one. Or maybe you have upgraded to a new version of Android, installed a custom ROM or got a new phone, and suddenly one of my applications says you no longer have a license. Hopefully I can help address a few of these issues here...

You can officially purchase any of my paid applications using the following methods:
If you have downloaded or purchased one of my paid applications from anywhere else, then beware as to what you are installing on your Android device as I cannot be responsible for supporting applications that pirates and bootleggers are publishing on the internet. The ones I am aware of are old and buggy versions of my applications, so I wouldn’t bother with them at all!

As the Amazon Appstore isn’t up yet and I don’t know how it works, I will focus on the Android Market and SlideMe...

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Help For WiFi File Explorer and SECuRET LiveStream Users


I often receive similar emails asking for help with 2 of my applications, WiFi File Explorer and SECuRET LiveStream, so I thought I would write a post that I can point users in the direction of to help answer their common queries. I should point out that the huge majority of users suffer no problems whatsoever with these applications – it is only a small handful of users that get caught out with this issue.

Both applications are similar in that they both require you to connect your Android device to a WiFi network and then when they start, you are prompted to enter a web address into a browser on a computer which is connected to that same WiFi network. Without going into too much technical detail, both WiFi File Explorer and SECuRET LiveStream are custom web servers that allow you to interface with your Android device using a web browser.

So the common problem is that users will start either one of the applications on the Android device, it will prompt them to enter an address into a web browser and then ... massive letdown - nothing will happen in the web browser; it will just display a connection error, or timeout. This leads to the inevitable poorly spelt, “Dis app sux – don’t even work. Uninstalling.” comment ... by the way, why do so many people include, ‘uninstalling’ in their comments? Do other people really care if they uninstalled the application or not?

Ah, but the applications don’t ‘sux’! The applications are actually pretty nifty and work perfectly, as proven by the thousands of happy customers that parted with cold hard cash to purchase them, or the 4.5 star rating of each one, of the high chart positions (not blowing my own trumpet or anything ;) ). The problem is down to user error or the network configuration; you know, all the stuff that is beyond my control, but I still get blamed for it anyway!

Now, to try and help the users that have difficulty using WiFi File Explorer and SECuRET LiveStream, I am going to give a few pointers below that should help you find the cause of the problem. Remember though, I don’t know how your network is configured, what network equipment you are using or how reliable it is, what security measures you have in place, or what you had for breakfast – I just write the applications, and I can only support them ... I won’t be your network administrator :P

Pointers are listed below ...