I still need to get back to improving SudoTape.  I have some things I want to improve, the top two things:

1. reorganize some of the strings so that I can get localized versions
2. improve the performance of drawing the markers when zooming

for issue #1 I noticed that there are a number of users in Latin America using SudoTape.  To be honest the majority of comments about the app directly have been in Spanish so I think there is likely some value in getting the app ported to Spanish, by reorganizing the strings.xml that will be much easier to do.  It helps that I work with people who are natively Spanish so perhaps I can persuade them to convert the app to Spanish if the content is laid out easy in my source.

For issue #2 it bugs me that zooming in is sluggish in SudoTape if you have a few markers defined.  I have an idea where the slowdowns are but I haven’t spent much time optimizing it.  There will be some value in optimizing it as personally I have a few project images that I defined 2-3 markers on and the app seriously slows down when zooming.

I also bought a tablet this past week.  woot.com had a sale on a Viewsonic gTablet which on paper is very similar to the highly touted Motorola Xoom, except it was less than 1/2 the price.  Sadly Woot wouldn’t ship to Canada but my parents are snowbirds and live in Arizona during the winters so I had the device shipped to them.

I’m pretty excited (being your token male gadget lover) but I won’t receive the device until Easter at the earliest.  I guess it will give me time to do some reading and think of writing an app for the thing.  Luckily XDA has a great following for the device so there will be a lot of fun had modifying it as well.

I’ve been out for a while, I haven’t done any real software development outside of work for a while.. just taking a break.

I bought Mafia 2 on Steam the other week which was on sale, I hadn’t finished or played a game for a while so it was nice to take a break.

The other day a friend from work had me look at his cheap Android tablet.  It was a cheap iPad ripoff from China but being a geek I like gadgets so I took the device home to play with it.  My friend wanted to get Honeycomb on the thing but 1) Honeycomb isn’t officially released 2) there is NO XDA support for the device 3) the device is pretty slow.  It has a decent clocked CPU (1ghz) but only has 256 MB of memory and that 1ghz processor is the old Arm11 which from what I understand is slow and inefficient.  Nonetheless it was a fun experimentation and gave me a new appreciation for tablet computers.  Now if they would finally come down in price.

It seems to me that all tablet computers are overpriced.  For the amount the cheapest high end device that is being sold you could get a pretty great netbook (or if you shopped around a fully usable Laptop.  Sure you could argue that a tablet is a lot more portable but I can guarantee that the laptop is also a lot better at doing computer type things.  It’s likely the ‘it’ factor that tablets have that is driving their perceived value up.

With the release of Honeycomb there will be a lot of competition though so with luck we’ll able to pay a lot less for even more powerful device before the end of 2011.  Then it will become a matter of “is there enough tablet specific software to make the purchase a lot more attractive”.

When submitting your app to Google marketplace you’re given a nice screen that shows where people who ran your app encountered bugs.  You can use this screen to help point out problems in your code that perhaps you missed or overlooked.

SudoTape v1.2 and v1.3 now available on the market addresses a few of these issues.  Some bugs make sense and it’s pretty easy to see how the problem occurs but some bugs you can see how it would crash but it’s really difficult to envision how the code would have crashed there.  Sadly not many users actually write in the report how they encountered the crash to give you input on how to fix the bug.

I adjusted the camera media manager of SudoTape and updated CameraTest accordingly.  It seems to work even better on my device, hopefully others will agree.