The Best Magic the Gathering Android App You Probably Don't Have

How often have you been at a Magic event or just playing with friends and you wanted to do some serious trading?  I mean the kind of trading where there are two high-value piles of cards about to change hands.  The kind of trade where a little miscalculation in value could cost you dearly.  Oh, I've been there.  It makes it a little intimidating to make those trades.  I've passed up on some great cards just because I was worried about making a bad trade.

Well, if you have an Android phone/device, the best app to help out with this is CCG Fair Trader.  There are a lot of apps that let you look up one card at a time, or even a few at a time.  CCG Fair Trader, however, lets you create multiple lists of cards and compare any two of them side-by-side.  You don't have to remember or write down the value of each card you look up.  You can check the price of a bunch of them all at once!

The prices are live and continuously updated by tcgplayer.com.  The guys at tcgplayer.com get card values from many vendors online so you know you are seeing the fairest price available.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you a better feel of how it works/looks:

In case you didn't notice, there are actually some cards from other games in that trade.  CCG Fair Trader can store card lists with cards from five different games:  Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft TCG (WoW TCG), Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Redakai.

If you play any of those games and ever make any trades, this app will make that a much better experience.  The full version is costs a little, but there is a trial/lite version for free that limits your card lists so you can get a feel for how it works.  If you ever made a bad trade since you didn't have the right value information, you know that the cost of this app (currently $1.49) can be pretty small in comparison.

Check it out on the Android Market.  If you have any questions, go to the developer's website forum or send an email (info at littlepancake dot com).

CCG Fair Trader Released!

Well, after months of slowing learning Android development and tweaking and poking, I've finally released my first Android app. The CCG Fair Trader is a tool for making sure you make a good trade of your collectible card game cards. It supports Magic the Gathering (MtG), Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, World of Warcraft TCG (WoW TCG), and Redakai. Basically it lets you create lists of cards and check their values using prices from TCGPlayer (prices are continually updated by that site from a large collection of online vendors). You can then look at any two of your lists and see their values side-by-side. Never get ripped off again! Well, at least while trading cards.

With this release, I've officially launched my awesome software company as well: Littlepancake Software. I'll probably be focusing on Android because it is the most accessible platform for which to develop, but in the future I may release stuff for other platforms.

Anyway, check it out if you have an Android phone and like any of the games listed above. There are free and paid versions. The free version limits the number of card lists and cards you can save, but pretty much has all the other functionality.

For questions about the app, try out the forums on littlepancake.com. I'll be more likely to see it sooner there than in the comments here.

That's it for now... enjoy these awesome screenshots!

NetBeans variable naming

Just a quick note since I'll forget later how I blew an hour of my time with NetBeans.

I received an error in the Generated Code section. This is annoying because you can't edit that section. but it is also good considering the time saved with GUI building. Anyway, the error was:

cannot find symbol
symbol: variable jdesktop
location: class java.lang.String
javax.swing.ActionMap actionMap = org.jdesktop.application.Application...blah...blah...blah

Looking at the generated code, the "jdesktop" had the red error squiggle underneath it. Usually with a "cannot find symbol" error, you take a look at your libraries and classpath and make sure they are OK. I hadn't touched them and the code was building just fine an hour prior.

Well, it turns out I had created a data member: "String org". "org" is a common abbreviation for "origin" when talking about flights (which is what this code deals with). Well, there is clearly no "jdesktop" member or method in the String class, hence this error. Ugh. That will teach me to abbreviate my java data member names. I changed it to "origin" and the IDE was happy again.

I guess you'd have the same problem if you had a data member called "com" and were calling some com.* class in a static way. Overall an unproductive hour, but an important lesson as well. I'll call it a wash.