John Spahr

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone! To celebrate the end of this miserable year, I have decided to release an update for one of my less important projects at the moment: ComplimentMe! This isn't by any means a minor update, either. I've redesigned a bunch of icons, significantly improved the UI, and have made some other important tweaks and fixes. Overall, I think the app looks a lot nicer now! Here it is! I feel that the updated user interface is much more pleasant, modern, and inviting. I have started rolling out this ComplimentMe update (2.0) to production. At the time I'm writing this, it has not been approved yet, and at the moment, it seems to be taking longer than usual for this to happen. I imagine this may be due to the holidays, so this update may not be available until 2021. However, when it does get approved, you'll be able to get it from the Play Store . Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you all have a happy new year and stay safe. Extra Note: Yesterday, I...

Hello, everybody! Please forgive me for the horrible joke, but it does kind of make sense in the case of SpeechLab Wear. I believe I released it at the beginning of October, but it's not really gotten any attention since then. That is, until now! I am pleased to share that I have finally released an update for SpeechLab Wear. It's not the most exciting update ever, but it does make a few nice improvements. The main thing this update adds is the introduction of icons for each of the quick phrases. I've also fixed some minor bugs in this release. Again, this isn't a particularly huge update. You can get the latest version of SpeechLab Wear from the Play Store . I hope you like it!

Hello, everyone. I’m excited to say that my BlackBerry OS apps have finally been released! Writing them hasn’t been easy due to some unforeseen issues, but I’m pretty pleased with the end result: two handy BBOS applications. In this post, I’ll be going over both of them and what they do. Special Characters Need to find a special character that can’t be accessed in the symbol menu? Special Characters conveniently categories a bunch of special characters and makes it easy to copy them to your clipboard! Circle Calculator Easily find the circumference, radius, diameter, and area of a circle on your BlackBerry OS device! Other handy features include a log and the ability to change the approximation of Pi. Wrapping things up... You can find these apps on the new  BlackBerry OS  page. I hope you like them!

Hello, everyone. I’m excited to say that Violoncello has received yet another update! Version 1.3 introduces a couple of important new features and makes some refinements to the overall experience. Here’s what’s new... Violoncello can now be set as the default browser on Android versions and devices that support it. Premium users can now change the color of the navigation bar and loading spinner! Bug fixes and other small tweaks. You can download Violoncello v1.3 from the Play Store .

Around a week ago, I discovered an issue that could very likely have thwarted my BlackBerry development plans had I not found a solution of sorts. After finding all the necessary tools, I had finally started working on my first BlackBerry app. At first, it ran fine on both my device and the emulator. However, after adding a few new features, a major issue came up: the app wouldn’t run on my device unless it was signed. Simple, right? So, all I needed to do was sign the app. That’s easy enough, right? Unfortunately not. You can still request new keys from BlackBerry, and they’ll send them to you, but the actual key registration setup utility does not work anymore. This is likely due to a dependency on some service that has been shut down. This meant that I couldn’t sign the app. After asking Twitter for advice, (Massive thanks to Nostalgitech and Paul Wallace for the help, by the way!) I realized that I was going to have to figure something else out. Some good news and some bad news....

I keep saying it, but it’s true! 2020 has been an absolutely awful year. However, there has been some good stuff that has happened throughout the misery, especially on this site. So, let’s take a look at the best things that have happened to Tectra each month of this year! January - ZZZ 😴 January was not the most productive month. However, this wasn’t my fault! My laptop was getting upgraded (which proved to be a longer process than what was originally expected) and I wasn’t really able to work on much. February - Back in business! About mid-February, my laptop was upgraded and ready to go! I released updates for PDF Toolbox and Syndicate and got back into the flow of working on my software. March - COVID changes everything... March was a pretty productive month. I released a new Palm OS and Android app. On top of all of that, I also updated many of my Windows programs. However, toward the middle of the month, everything changed when we shut down. One positive result of this was that...

It's hard to believe that this miserable year is finally almost over, yet here we are! Obviously, the beginning of a new year isn't going to fix everything wrong today, but it is a new start. Unfortunately, there is still a bit of 2020 left, and in this post, I’ll be going over my plans for the remainder of this wretched year. Let’s begin! Hello, BlackBerry! After many days of waiting, my BlackBerry Bold has finally arrived! If you’ve been following my blog for a while now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve already started working on writing some apps for it. This month, I hope to release 2 BlackBerry apps simultaneously. The first one is very likely going to be a circle calculator, and I’ve started working on that one. I’m unsure what the other app is going to be at this point. However, I’m currently considering making something like PreBook for BlackBerry OS, so keep an eye out for more updates on that! Android and Wear OS Updates Additionally, I hope to release some...

Well, that was probably unexpected. However, after some careful consideration, I have now made LifeBord free. Before I begin, I would like to say that I am only making LifeBoard free. Violoncello will continue to offer a paid, premium version for the foreseeable future. With that out of the way, I feel that I should explain why I made LifeBoard free. For those of you who are not aware, LifeBoard had an upfront cost of $0.99. There was no lite version or any other way to test the app before buying it. This presented a problem. Today, most people want to use an Android app before they pay money for it, especially when the app comes from a small publisher like myself. This started to become increasingly clear as time went on, and I knew I was going to have to switch strategies for my next app. As a result, Violoncello Premium was born. For just $0.99, you could get a few nice extras while supporting the app’s development. Best of all, since this upgrade was in the form of an in-app pur...

Hi, everybody! I'm happy to say that a new update for Violoncello (1.2.0) has been released! It introduces a lot of exciting new features while making several improvements to the overall experience. Some of these include menu options to toggle the visibility of the navigation bar and to jump to the top of the page. Additionally, Premium users get 4 new fonts to choose from, the app now can be used in landscape mode, and the way links are handled has been updated and improved. All of these additions and refinements make for a pretty exciting update! Version 1.2.0 is available for download on the Play Store . Enjoy! A screenshot of version 1.2.0.

These days, when you hear BlackBerry, (in the context of electronics) you likely think of a mobile phone that’s designed to get stuff done. It’s not an entertainment device; it’s a tool for all things business. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with a BlackBerry! Today, I’m excited to announce that I’ll (hopefully) be writing some new apps for a platform I’ve never developed for: BlackBerry OS. Now, as a fan of old technology, I like to own a device that runs the platform I’m developing for and Blackberry is no exception. That’s right, I bought a BlackBerry! The model I purchased is the Verizon BlackBerry Bold 9930 running Blackberry OS 7. (Though I’m 99% sure it can upgraded to 7.1 if my model hasn’t been already) BlackBerry is nice and has kept their OS 7 development resources online, so I’ll hopefully be able to get started pretty quickly. Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that I’ll definitely be able to start writing Blackberry apps. It’s possible that the device mi...