The Sales Pitch

The View Friends screen with
the Context Menu showing.

Despite being a hobby developer I have managed to make a friend or two. They are patient people, my friends. I know it to be so, because they remain friends despite the fact that it can go months between my calls. No matter what my excuses are (hell at work; travel; love bliss/trouble) it is a bad thing and I decided that as a true hobby programmer I would find a technical solution to my problem. Enter: Base Toucher.

Base Toucher select people in your Android contact list and select a Contact Frequency. You can e.g. choose to call your mum once a week and your publisher twice a year. Once a day Base Toucher will check your call log. If you have been good and stayed in touch with your friends it will not bother you. But if you are due to speak with one of your friends, you will be notified of your anti-social behaviour.

Features at a glance

• A View Friends screen showing you who you care about enough to stay in touch with.
• An Edit Friend screen where you can:
  • Set the Contact Frequency of your friend. Either choose among a set of common options, or just enter the number of days you maximum want to pass between calls.
  • Set the Last Date of Contact manually. Useful if you’ve met one of your friend at a party. You’ve touched base. Now let Base Toucher know so it can do it’s job.
  • Call Friend. Fine you could dial the number manually, but this is so much more convenient!
  • Delete Friend. Of course this just removes the friend from Base Toucher. The underlying Android Contact remains.
• Set the Notification Time. Base Toucher checks up on your list of friends once a day and notifies you through the standard notification bar if (and only if) there are friends who you should call. Since it only checks once a day Base Toucher won’t adversely affect your phone performance.
• Starts at boot-up. In other words, if you restart your phone Base Toucher will still alert you once the Notification Time comes along.

The Edit Friend screen.

• Ignores calls too short to count. Base Toucher is there to make sure that you stay in touch with your friends and it takes its job seriously. Any call shorter than two minutes will not count as a proper catch-up when it checks if you’ve stayed in touch with your friend.
• Persistent call log. If your techno-phobic auntie accidentally erases your call log, don’t worry. Base Toucher will still remember when you last were in contact with your friends.

Limitations of the trial version

Like any good merchant in addictive experiences (and what is not good software) I know to offer a few samples to get the attention of my customers. Base Toucher therefor comes in two flavours, a trial and a a full version. The trial version limits you to only keep in touch with five friends. Accomplished as you are you naturally enjoy a far wider circle of friends and have money to burn, so why not get the full, limitless, version?

How do I do stuff?

Good question. The answer is probably, “Pretty easily”. Base Toucher is useful in a graceful kind of way, so instead of writing a manual I thought I would just give you the quick run-down of how to do stuff.

How do I add a contact to Base Toucher?

Launch Base Toucher. This takes you to the View Friends screen. Open the context menu (Menu button on your phone) and press ‘Add Friend’. This brings up a list of all contacts in your phone that has at least one phone. Press the contact to add.

The Set Notification Time dialogue.

How do I set the Contact Frequency of a friend?

Edit your friend by pressing him/her on the View Friends screen. Press the ‘Set Contact Frequency’ button. In the dialogue that opens press the drop down menu and select your contact frequency. If you want to set a different frequency than one offered in the list you can type a custom frequency (in number of days) in the text field below. Finish by pressing ‘OK’. The change is immediately saved.

I met my friend yesterday. How do I tell Base Toucher to treat that as the last day I met my friend?

Edit your friend by pressing him/her on the View Friends screen. Press the ‘Set Date of Last Contact’ button. In the dialogue that opens select the date to set as the new ‘Last Contacted’ date. Finish by pressing ‘OK’. The change is immediately saved.

Note that if you enter a future date Base Toucher will ignore you¹. If you enter a date earlier than the latest (long enough) call in the call log, Base Toucher will use the day of that call as the date of your last contact.

How do I delete a friend?

Edit your friend by pressing him/her on the View Friends screen. Press the ‘Delete Friend’ button. Confirm by pressing ‘OK’.

How do I change the time when Base Toucher notifies me of friends I should call?

Launch Base Toucher. This takes you to the View Friends screen. Open the context menu (Menu button on your phone) and press ‘Set Alert Time’. Set the desired time and confirm by pressing ‘Set’.

How do I deal with the notification?

Simple. Press it and it will take you to the View Friends view where the friends that you should have called already are at the top of the list marked in red text.

Release Log

v1.0.0

Oooh! First ever Android release.

v1.0.1

Added a help screen explaining some of the basic functions of the application. Also, if there are no friends listed under the View Friends screen, Base Toucher will open the Options Menu to hint at what the user should do next.

v1.0.2

Fixed a bug where the application couldn’t be started from within the Market application.

v1.0.3

Fixes a cupcake bug.

v1.1.0

Notifications show the number of friends due for a call.

Planned Releases

Nope, I don’t have any planned right now. But, if I get bugs reported or new (good) feature requests, there may very well be updates.