5000+ downloads and going strong

AIRS passed the 5000 downloads mark on 17th of October!

Many thanks to all who have downloaded AIRS in the past and tried it out. It shows that AIRS is useful to some extent, which is encouraging and stimulating for future improvements and developments. As you might have noticed, there are frequent updates to AIRS, addressing various issues and improvements. In order to keep you all motivated to download and update in the future, let me share a few ideas and improvements I’m working on:

• battery improvements: the impact on battery lifetime is clearly the biggest issue. Recent changes, such as in the weather polling and the wifi wake lock implementation, have already improved battery life. Current work aims at removing wakelocks in general through using alarms instead. It is interesting to see if this will have a positive impact on the battery life. Overall, however, recording with a large amount of sources (such as Bluetooth and audio sampling) will always consume battery.
• Integration of new sensors: I’m constantly looking into new sources of information to be included into AIRS. That includes local information from the phone but also attached sensors, e.g., via USB accessories. If you have any specific idea for inclusion, please let me know (in the comment below or send an email).
• Improvement of stability: AIRS has been running in own tests and recording for over a year now. Crashes do happen although they are becoming rarer during recording. There are certain information sources that instable from time to time (such as audio recording) and I’m working on improving this.
• Improve usage of database storage: Having moved to SQLite with V2.2 improved the data handling in that it increases security (the data is stored now in the more secure /data directory) but also allows for retrieving the data easier, e.g., for visualisation AIRS already provides a recent history of recordings (when opening program from the notification bar) but more is to come…

Of course, any feedback on desired new features or improvements are always welcome! For now, keep downloading and playing with AIRS!