We have launched our newly designed Android market app, version 5 of the SlideME Application Manager (SAM), and we wanted to highlight some of the new features that you might not yet know about in the new SAM 5.
This is a minor release that provides sorting options for main catalog entries. There are also a number of bug fixes including: storage locker appearing blank, needing to login twice to storage locker, a possible crash after watching app video, a crash if user scanned a QR code and the catalog info had not been previously stored in SAM's catalog.
This is a major 3.0 release of SAM. Features include an image gallery for up to three screenshots and the ability of the user to play youtube videos of the applications. There is also a new feature for viewing, sorting and installing applications directly from the SD Card.
SAM 3.0 supports it's own intent for launching on application links, allowing users to scan QR Codes or click links, taking them directly to the application within SAM.
This release also includes important fixes for improved application search and for encoding problems during login.
For nearly the last two years, we've been focused on our core project SAM (SlideME Application Manager) but have never been able to release it into the Android Market due to Google's non-compete terms.
It's finally public: the SlideME Application Manager is on the HTC Hero devices released in Malaysia and Vietnam. So now I can discuss with the community a little of the background of what was happening with SlideME over the summer and what to expect in the coming months.
If you tracked SAM releases, you would have noticed that we did four releases from mid-to-late May, all containing localization support of various languages, including Vietnamese. This was to get a version of SAM into the hands of HTC.
SAM v2.8 (released on June 9, 2009) was a major re-write of much of the plumbing in SAM. We previously downloaded the entire catalog on startup and while this worked for 30-40 apps, it was killing the SAM client performance at 150+ apps; certain application entries were getting completely dropped. We needed to fix this if we wanted to scale with an HTC release.
SlideME is pleased to announce SAM 2.9, a minor release of our mobile marketplace for Android applications. Features include user options of opening, re-downloading and deleting applications from within the storage locker.
This release also has important bug fixes for problems with auto-updating of newer versions of SAM and for login errors that some users experienced with the storage locker. SAM also now detects when the SD card is not available.
SlideME is pleased to announce SAM 2.4, a major release of our mobile marketplace for Android applications. Features include: catalog search, catalog refresh, featured gallery and updates page. We've also localized SAM into multiple languages - German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian - with more languages to follow in 2.5.
We've fixed numerous bugs, including: some catalog entries not showing up, app displays without screenshots being blank, ratings not properly displaying. Also we've made a number of optimizations to make SAM more responsive to the user.
SlideME is pleased to announce support for paid applications with our release of SAM 2.3, the first billing solution for Android that includes a mobile client. You can download SAM 2.3 at http://slideme.org/sam2.apk