FriendCaster

A Facebook client for Android devices which allows you to access Facebook quickly and easily, with lots of features not found in other apps, including the official app.

FriendCaster started out as a hobby project in Summer 2010. I’d had a couple of devices running Android but was never satisfied with the experience of using Facebook on Android. In the end I decided to create my own with the feature I most wanted: notification alerts. Since then, it has be named ‘Blue Notify’, F-Plus, Flow and now FriendCaster and has grown to be the most popular 3rd-party Facebook client on Android. As of early December 2011, FriendCaster is now ranked in the Top 250 Free and Top 125 Paid Apps in Android Market, having had over 2,300,000 downloads.

In May 2011, Handmark acquired the app, and have since contracted me to continue development.

You can find more information about FriendCaster on Handmark’s mini-site.

Pull-to-Refresh for Android

This Pull-to-Refresh library is something I created as part of my work with FriendCaster. After being unhappy with the previous implementations of Pull-to-Refresh, I decided to write my own using Johan Nilsson’s implementation as a base (mainly for graphics, animations and strings). The result is an implementation which works as well as any other platform and has been implemented generically so that it can be used with a variety of AdapterView’s, including ListView, GridView and ExpandableListView.

It it released under the Apache Licence, v2.0 and is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/chrisbanes/Android-PullToRefresh

There is also a sample application which tries to show the library off, available here.