As some people might know, I’m presently employed at Kik Interactive. Yeah, the guys who make the smartphone messenger app. My job is to make apps that use their new Developer API to send content between phones.
Well, I’ve been working on a few different apps over the past few months, but the first to fully see the light of day is called FileKicker. It’s really simple: send files to your friends via Kik. The cool thing is, because of the way Kik Messages are sent, you can actually access this file anywhere using its url, which is easily shareable from the app. Check out FileKicker in the Android Market to download it or learn more.
Something that’s crazy is the alternative Android market site syndication. I just uploaded this a few hours ago, and already a Google search for FileKicker kik returns results for site for androidzoom.com with a page on my app. I don’t see how it’s better than the regular market, but it did generate a nice little widget:
I’m planning to have some more apps up in the coming weeks. Leave a comment if you have any awesome ideas for what I could do with Kik next.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
Holger Jakobs » 8 Sep 2011 »
Hi,
Just tried ContactKicker, which was a bit disappointing. Why doesn’t kik messenger hook itself into the system, so that it show up whenever you start sending a contact from the standard contact app? That would make ContactKicker redundant.
When I picked a contact to be sent via ContactKicker, only the first phone number and first mail address were sent. Those showing up first in the contact may not be the most important ones, and there may be people with several important phone numbers.
FileKicker is something I found more useful. Actually, an instant messenger doesn’t have to have the feature of sending big files. Those can go via email. But it is nice to have, just in case you don’t have a kikster’s mail address at hand.
The best “extension” to kik in my opinion would be the possibility to send kik messages from ordinary computers. That would make a lot of monitoring apps possible.
Best Regards,
Holger
Malcolm » 8 Sep 2011 »
Hi Holger,
Nice to hear from you. ContactKicker was the first app I made, just to try out the Kik API. I have realized that it only grabs the first email, and I’ve been meaning to get around to adding a chooser, but I’m super busy at the moment. I hope to get a chance in the next couple of weeks.
With regard to deeper integration, I don’t think that’s possible. On my device, at least, the only “send contact” options are via SMS, Mail & Bluetooth. From what I’ve learned about the backend of Android, it doesn’t look like there’s a way to add options to that list. The other answer to your question “Why doesn’t Kik…” is that Kik is trying to make the chat app as simple as possible. This is the reason for the extensions / platform apps — they allow greater functionality to be built on top of Kik Messenger without compromising simplicity. I agree with you though, that this would be nice to have integrated.
I also agree that having the ability to tap into the Kik message system from other machines would be hugely useful, although I’m pretty sure there aren’t any imminent plans to implement this. But yeah, I’d love to get reminders via Kik and so on. What sorts of monitoring apps are you talking about? You mean like a webcam that would Kik you a picture every so often?
Cheers,
Malcolm
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