Welcome

I've recently embarked on writing my second Android app.  My first one, Tapster, was kind of a novelty app that was built to entertain me and my colleagues while working at PerTrac.

This new app, working title ActionReaction, came about as a means of scratching my own itch.  I use William Hill sportsbook on my phone (http://www.williamhill.us/).  It is legal in Nevada, where I live.  Anyway, I spray around a bunch of little bets, mostly on football, as a means of entertaining myself.  Well, the app is good for getting your bet in, but not good for much more than that.  So I'm writing an app that will help me track and follow bets, hopefully with some real time updates when scores change and so forth.

So, with that being said, I started writing the app this week.  The basic toolchain is:

1. IDE:  IntelliJ IDEA 12
2. Android Platform:  4.2.2

Some risks:

1. If I move out of the state of Nevada, I can't use the app and the project is basically dead
2. I probably can't put it on the Google Play store, as they frown on gambling.  You currently have to download the William Hill app from their site, you can't get it on Google Play store.  This sucks because it cuts of a big distribution channel.

With that being said, it's still fun to write apps that have a purpose, rather than contrived ones that you're not really passionate about.  So I'm going for it.

One of the things I needed was OCR (Optical Character Recognition).  After placing a bet in the William Hill app, the best you can get for a summary is a screenshot.  They give you no email, no copy past ability, nothing.  So the best workflow I could come up with is to screenshot the summary screen, and then share the picture with my application. 

Through the use of Intents, my application (I'll use the abbreviation AR for my app) will take the image and parse the text out of it. Then I'll have to model the domain and turn this information into tickets,or bets, with types (parlay, straight bet, etc).  At this point, I'm thinking of calling into some web based API to get scores or live updates, so that I can notify the user that some action is happening in his game(s).

I'll try to keep this blog updated as much as possible and chronicle my efforts as I go.  Stay tuned!