John Harding - Insert Catchy Title Here

I frequently worry that I forgot to close my garage door. When this happens, I can either drive back home just to check, or assume that I closed it and try to move on with my life. While there are much better solutions to this problem, I decided to solve it by writing an Android app.

The app periodically takes a picture using the camera in the phone, and uploads it to a site where the picture can be viewed. At first, this was just a single location on my personal server, but for release, I created a simple Google AppEngine application to receive, list, and display the images.

Please post any thoughts/feedback in the comments. Some things I'll probably add:

• Configurable # of recent images to be stored
• Automatic generation of time-lapse video
• Permissions/protection on the posted images

Other weird stuff:

• It asks for permission to read the phone state - this is used to get the device's IMEI as a unique identifier. I'm sure there are better solutions, and you can just manually set an identifier in the settings. Problem will go away when I add permissions.
  
• Dealing with the camera is a pain in the butt. The emulator camera doesn't behave at all like the real hardware. Currently, I re-initialize the camera after every picture, which is probably bad. Focus is flaky. And sometimes it ends up with a blank image, due to race conditions which I need to fix. Blah blah blah.
• It's ugly. I know.