JULY 6 UPDATE: We have a good pool of developers to choose from at this time, so we are no longer accepting applicants for this project. Thank you for all of the interest!

We’re very much in love with Android and would like nothing more than to have a desktop widget to always have our stats available at a quick glance. If you’re not familiar with Android widgets, they’re basically apps that run on your desktop alongside your icons. For example, on the right hand side is a screenshot of the Pandora widget – you can control the entire app without actually being inside the app.

We really dig this functionality and are looking for something similar for Clicky so you can always have your stats right in front of you. I personally am interested in exploring Android development in the future because I believe very strongly in this operating system, but I don’t know Java and it would probably take me several months of full time development to get something like this up and running – time I don’t currently have.

What the widget should do

  • When user adds the widget to their desktop:
    • Four sizes to choose from in the widget menu – 2×1, 4×1, 2×2, and 4×2. We wish the widget size was definable at run time but it’s not so we’ll have to pollute the widget menu with four sizes 🙁
    • If they are adding this widget for the first time, you need to ask for their credentials, which you send to an API to grab their list of sites. You save these credentials locally on the phone so if the user adds more than one widget, they don’t have to re-enter their credentials. (Note to users concerned with privacy – we’re inventing a new version of OAuth called “Simple OAuth” that will protect your password and let you revoke access to services as needed, without having to change your password – more details on that later). Once the credentials have been verified, the next screen lets them select all of the following options on one screen:
    • The web site they want the widget to display stats for.
    • Refresh interval (5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 2h, 3h, 4h) (Note: when device is sleeping, the data should not be refreshed. It should only be refreshed upon wake, or while the device is in use).
    • Widgets 1 panel high show site name at top, then visitors and actions below that for “today” (including trend percentages for each item). If it’s 2 panels high, also show bounce rate and goals/revenue (if they have goals setup). Use icons rather than text to differentiate these data types, to save space (if you’re not familiar with Clicky, see our demo to see the icons we use).
  • If the widget is 4 panels wide (4×1 or 4×2), they can one choose additional piece of data to display:
      • Additional dates for the default data (e.g. column 2 could show “yesterday” or “last 7 days” for visitors/actions/etc)
      • “Popular” data types (e.g. top searches, top goals, etc),
      • Graph of hourly data for visitors or actions for “today”, or graph of visitors or actions for the last 30 days
  • Clicking the widget opens up a full screen window:
    • Shows same data but with more detail – e.g. for visitors/actions/bounce/goals, it could show a sparkline graph next to each of them showing data for the last 30 days (using a free charting API such as Google Charts).
    • Below this, show the top 30 items for their top content that day, or if their widget is 4 panels wide and they have selected a “popular” data type (e.g. searches) to display in the extra space, then show that type by default instead. And have a menu either way that lets them choose a different type to display (e.g. change from top content to top searches). Obviously, all 30 items won’t fit on one screen, so the window should be scrollable, and have a “next page” button at the bottom, so they can view 31-60, etc.
    • Date range picker to view data for more than just today (only in this view though, not for the widget itself, which should always default to “today”)
  • User can add multiple widgets to their desktop, one for each site.
  • This needs to be compatible with at least Android 2.0 through 2.2. And if it’s not too difficult, 1.5 and 1.6 as well.
  • We need to be the “owner” of this software, and hence you will need to provide the source code to us so we can improve it ourselves in the future or have someone else do so for us if you are not available for future development. We will happily credit you as the original developer, but we need to own the product, which also means that in the Android Market, it will be listed as a product of our company, Roxr Software Ltd. (And of course, this widget will be totally free for all of our users). This doesn’t mean we’re going to “take” the code from you – you can keep it for yourself to base other projects on (except for a competing analytics service – we’d have a problem with that).
  • We have very high standards with regards to quality and aesthetics. This needs to be a very solid app, and it needs to look so good that our users will want to eat it. To give you an idea of what we like, we really dig the “finance” widgets that Google offers (see screenshot to the right). We like subtle transparency and shading of the background, and the shadow/transparency on the edges, which makes the widget feels like it’s “in” the desktop. Having a shadow “underneath” the widget, to make it feel like it’s “on” instead of “in” the desktop, would be fine too.
  • We of course have a very thorough stats API already, that you will be using to get all of the data that will be displayed in the widget.

Interested?

If you’ve got what it takes, email [email protected] with the subject line “Android widget”. Or if you know someone who may be eligible, send them a link to this post.

In your email, tell us what Android applications and/or widgets you have developed. You must have Android development experience, and you’ll get super bonus points if you have created a widget. And super mega bonus points if you are able to start immediately and can devote at least 20 hours a week to development – we’d like to have this released within 2 months.

We will pay you $1,000 up front, an additional $1,000 once a beta version is ready for us to play with, and the rest upon completion of the product. We prefer to pay with Paypal to keep things simple and fast, but we can pay by check if you prefer.

Lastly, we are open to negotiation on the price. We think this will be about 100 hours of work, so it’s equivalent to $50/hour or a $100K/year job. But if you think otherwise, when you email us, tell us your price.

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