I have spent the last 5 weeks working on the all-new Buffer for Android. I’ve learnt a lot about Android and Java, and it has been great fun. I am really happy with version 2.0. It was very exciting to release it to the world last night.
We’ve had a lot of feedback, most of it very positive, thank you to everyone who has tried it and given feedback. There are a few things that i want to mention here.
Time zone issues
At the moment, the API is reporting the time in GMT rather than your local time. This is a mistake from us, and we should have caught that, so sorry about that. I am sure Joel or Tom can get it fixed very soon, and you won’t need to update the Android app, it will just start working for you automatically.
Rest assured that your updates will still be sent according to your schedule, whether you add them through the Android app or through the web. The web will show the correct times for you.
Update: Tom has since fixed this issue! :)
No default profile selected
It is possible that you might have no profile selected. You’ll get the message “Please select at least one profile to post from”. I realise this could be annoying. I will make a fix so that if you only have one profile, that one will get selected automatically.
Update: This is fixed in version 2.0.1 which is now available. I’ll keep the following workaround here because it might still be useful.
In the meantime there is a workaround you can use. Go to your Buffer profile settings and click “add default”.
Having done that, go into Buffer on your phone, use the menu to choose Sign out and then sign in again. From now on it will select your profile by default.
Refresh interval
To speed things up on your phone, i have added some caching so that it doesn’t continually have to connect to the internet. The cache lasts for 2 hours, or until you add or edit updates from your phone, at which point it fetches again from the Buffer API.
If you add or reorder updates from another device, or in the web app, they might not necessarily be shown in your Android app, due to this caching. You can always force a refresh by choosing the Refresh option from the menu.
Short URLs
We are currently not providing an option to shorten URLs within the Android app. We plan to add this in a future release but right now you might see that a long URL means you haven’t enough characters to write everything you want to say.
As a workaround, if you add the update to your Buffer, you’ll find that it does shorten the URL for you. You can then go into the app and edit the update to add your comment. (A long-press on the update will give you the option to edit, copy text or delete.)
Update: Dan Monzelowsky suggests sharing first to an app called Abbrevator! to get a short link, and then sharing from there to Buffer.
Update 2: Version 2.0.1 now shortens URLs for you and it’s available in the marketplace now! :)
Anything else?
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. We’re eager for feedback and suggestions so don’t hesitate. If you have any other tricks/workarounds for using version 2.0 please share them too! :)
a little place of calm 