Redwall before it had a name, it started as a project with some pretty strange requirements. I wanted to build something on android with social-esque features, but I didn’t want to pay for lots of servers to handle massive amounts traffic. In fact, I didn’t want to spend any money or time after I built it. I wanted it to just work.
Use the force Luke
There are a few options for handling accounts. You could go with Facebook, Twitter, GitHub even. But one other website really got me thinking, Reddit. Reddit has a json (and xml) api that’s fairly straight forward and easy to use. Reddis api provides a mechanism for submitting, rating, and moderating content.
I came up with the idea of using Reddit and imgur.com to build a social wallpaper app. Complete with Archives, Rating, Comments, and Moderation. There are a lot of features missing, but for this project/experiment it didn’t really matter. I was satisfied with what I could achieve with Reddit’s free api.
Redwall was born!
All of the social features come from the reddit api. All the content in the app is feed via r/redwall. In more detail, it only lists imgur.com links from r/redwall.
There is no registration required to browse the wallpaper selection from the app (or even r/redwall for that matter,) which allows new users, the kind that just want to consume from the community a direct pass to the wallpapers. On the other hand, users must have a reddit account to submit to the gallery. And you can only submit from the Reddit, not from the app. But I don’t care. It works pretty well (their are definitely spots of code I need to update. Downloading in background, size filters, etc…). The source code is available on Github if you are interested in helping.
Best of all is I don’t pay a dime for the features that Reddit provides.
Where to grab Redwall
Redwall on Github: https://github.com/willwharton/redwallandroid
Redwall on Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kudzu.android.redwall
Redwall Pro on Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kudzu.android.redwall.pro
Redwall Android Market QR
Redwall PRO Android Market QR