While this is still very much a work in progress, I’ve decided to release this first beta version. It’ll be a functional version that supports several features listed in the previous post about the program.
Short guide
When you initially start it up, you’ll see a currency symbol on the screen, and the application will appear to have frozen up. It hasn’t, it’s just loading the list of currencies from an array, which seems to take forever (20+ seconds on slower phones) unless you have a powerful phone like the W960 from Sony-Ericsson.
Once it finishes loading the screen should look something like this:
There are three important fields to consider here; the first one is the amount, which represents the amount of “from” currency you’re converting into “to” currency. The other two are the “from” and “to” currencies selected with the “Sel” (or “Select”) option.
Once the currencies have been selected and the amount has been entered, you can activate the “Calc” option which will go online and fetch the rating (after asking for permission to do so), and then calculate the result before displaying it to you.
The rates will be stored for up to 24 hours after which the program will try to download the new rates, if you attempt to convert between those two rates again.
Please note that the program will use the rate for conversions both ways which can give a fractional difference in the result. Thus is you convert USD to EUR, it’ll download the rate for that. If you then convert USD to EUR, or EUR to USD within 24 hours, it’ll use that same rating, which saves bandwidth, something that’s desirable to most people.
The rest
There are other parts of the program that I haven’t explained here, like the “MemStats” page, which will show you how much memory the program is using, as well as the number of entries in the RecordStore (RS). It’ll also allow you to “Purge RS” which will delete entries older than 24 hours, though this shouldn’t as such be necessary since they don’t take up a lot of space, but running through the records can take a bit longer (mere seconds) if there’s a lot of entries in the RS.
“Clear RS” will remove all entries, no matter what their age is. And of course, you can use the “List RS” to see the individual rates registered in the RS as well as how old they are. From here you can also Purge or Clear, as well as delete individual entries.
Reporting back
If you find anything wrong with the program, no matter how minute it might be, please let me know about it. But please be specific, because comments such as “This sucks!” are valid opinions, but they won’t help me create a better program. I hope some of you will try it out, and let me know what you think.