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.

I always ignored the ‘share’ option when taking a picture with the built in camera on my phone but after using it a few times with Facebook I realized how nice it worked.  I plugged this functionality into SudoTape so it’s now able to accept and use the share option as well.  Seems to work better for my Galaxy S than the camera capture that exists in SudoTape.  I think there are still timing issues in the capture process even with all the work I did regarding capturing images and the CameraTest prototype.

At any rate, go to the market and get v1.1

I finally released SudoTape to the market.  The last stretch was around testing and getting some of the final artwork done.

I initially listed it in the photography section of the market but this morning I revised it and put it in the tools section.  You don’t really need to have a camera on your device in order to use it so it makes more sense to put it in the tools section.  I don’t know if the market automatically filters stuff out so even if you don’t have a camera and the app doesn’t really need a camera I’m not sure if you’d see it as available to download or not.  Not that it matters though, I presume most devices come with at least one camera now anyway.

I had problems creating a signed APK, I never really read anything about it and Google’s information online is sketchy at best, at whatever documentation I found was related to Eclipse so it wasn’t much help since I use IntelliJ.  Luckily IntelliJ’s created signed APK wizard wasn’t too tricky so I uploaded the app and some art/screenshots last night.

Going to see if anyone downloads it to see how much I want to support it.  I’d like to add some other features like saving the files to DropBox, perhaps unit conversions on the define markers options dialog, etc.  If there is little interest I’ll hold off adding more features and think of a new project.

You can find SudoTape on the market here:  https://market.android.com/details?id=net.pixelsystems.sudotape

You can read SudoTape’s basic documentation here: http://pixelsystems.net/?page_id=66

I finally figured out how to use GitHub.  It didn’t work well at all with IntelliJ, mostly because the learning curve is pretty vertical regarding to setting up permissions and connecting github with your machine (pgp keys, etc).

You can read about my first github project here and all the trouble I had getting camera images from the camera functionality on your Android phone into my Android app.

My app is functionally complete.  I need to do more testing and I have a bug related to importing a photo taking by the device’s camera that I can’t reproduce but the graphic designer reproduces on his HTC Evo.  I need to get a logcat from him to try and troubleshoot where the problem might be.  I’ve sent out feelers to some of my other contacts on Android to see if they can reproduce the problem.

I need to get the final artwork from the designer as well as design an about screen as well.  There are a number of ideas I have related to improving the app but I want to see how it does on the market before adding many more features.  Probably one of the nice things about releasing a free app, if no one uses it I feel less compelled to update and improve it.

I like what it does though and I can see myself using it regularly so at any rate it does what I set out to have it do.

I spent some time looking at GreenDroid . I like the idea of a unified library to help aid in developing apps but I couldn’t get it to work very well, not in IntelliJ and not outside of his sample application.  Either way there wasn’t going to be easy way to integrate it into all the work I had done already.  I really liked his QuickActions work which is what lead me to GreenDroid but in the end I had to abandon using it.

I stumbled on some work that Lorenz did around QuickActions and the code was free to use, easy to understand and easy to modify which was pretty exciting.  He had a bunch of samples that were easy to build and play with which was always nice.

I started looking into new projects but find myself intimidated by all the dp dpi px and other screen resolution type issues that people regularly complain about.  It’s probably just a matter of doing some reading and experimenting.

My project is coming along nicely.  I learned the hard way that the Android emulator is quite different than an actual device so when I got my phone back running my project on it pointed out a number of issues that I hadn’t thought of because they weren’t exposed with the emulator.

Here are some issues I tackled with recently:

• If you have multiple <intent-filter sections in yourAndroidManifest.xml defining:

<action android:name=”android.intent.action.MAIN” />

<category android:name=”android.intent.category.LAUNCHER” />

then each of those sections will create icons for your application with no other identification saying which is which.. Can be a bit confusing on which icon to press to run what main mechanism

• If you are launching an custom intent/activity from preferences DO NOT specify data= in your preferences.xml unless you are set to handle it, otherwise you will get a “cannot find activity” exception.  This took me several hours to discover, a lot of head scratching and swearing because I got lazy and never deleted the data= part that I copied from Google’s example code.
• The bundle as the argument to onCreate() for your activity is actually very useful and tied to onSaveInstanceState(), this I supposed is common sense but no example I read actually showed them being used together so some digging exposed to me how to use it, very handy.
• PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences() is super easy to use, beats property file loading/saving which I use at work a lot.
• My app is targeting Android 2.1 so I couldn’t use Camera.getNumberOfCameras().  I was using Camera.open() to find out if the device has a camera but not calling Camera.release() which caused some really strange exceptions later on in my code
• this information on screens proved very important to several UI problems I was having (multi-touch), should be fundamental reading for anyone learning Android programming.

Well after much complaining, petitions, calls I finally got a replacement phone.  Bell called me and offered to replace the phone with a brand new one.

Sadly I had to wait until now to get it.  The Christmas holidays and slow mail service during the holidays had me wait a couple of weeks but at least I have a new phone.  I have to send back the old repaired phone when they finally get around to fixing it so I have some time to see how this new phone fares.  To be honest I’m not sure I expect it will last any longer.  The new phone they sent has nearly the exact same manufacturing date and considering my luck with XBOXes the manufacturing dates usually mean that I’ll get another dud,  but at least I’m up and running again.  When I do get my old repaired phone I’ll have two choices from which to choose and will hopefully have enough information to make an informed choice which is better (ie: does the old phone have new hardware in it or did they just flash the SD card for the least reliable fix out there).

For Christmas I bought a Canon T2i DSLR camera, it’s good but the learning curve is nearly vertical, especially for someone like me who came from a point and shoot.  It takes great pictures though and learning something new is always fun.  Youtube has a lot of great tutorial videos as well.

I bought a cheap Samsung plasma TV and Sherwood audio receiver for my other place hooked up the TV to my WDTV to watch a UFC fight (to make sure the TV was working without any dead pixels before I move it) and read the manual for the receiver which should do what I’m expecting for a simple multi-room stereo.

I’m still working on my first Android app.  I’m having some real trouble finding someone to draw icons for me.  I’m terrible at icon type art so if I can’t find anyone to draw for me then I’ll be stuck using some of the free icons, which is pretty disappointing.

Well, my phone is dead.

I ran into the dreaded internal SD Card failure.  No real warning, it just died.  I had the phone sitting on my desk, went to go get it and the screen wouldn’t turn on, buttons lit up but no response.  Rebooted the phone and it’s stuck at the boot logo.

No different ROM flashes would fix the device, all the logs said the SD card could not be mounted.

I went to the place where the phone was bought in hopes they would replace the device.  No dice, they told me to talk to Bell.  Went to the first Bell store:

“Oh I can fix that”  .. “hmmm” .. “yeah I can’t fix this, you need to send it into Bell”

went to another Bell store, one that actually sends phones into Bell for repair.

“Oh I can fix that” … “hmmm” ..  “yeah I can’t fix this, you need to send it in”

I’m amazed that some of these people actually work at the store.  I had the guy suggest to me that he was fixing the device when get got the phone into Download mode.

All this does is put the phone into recovery mode where you can update it via the PC.  The guy was suggesting that the phone was “updating itself” and all we had to do was wait.  I didn’t say anything trying not to smirk/laugh.  Needless to say he gave up too.

The worst part is that this is definitely a design flaw on the I9000M model offered exclusively through Bell and neither Bell nor Samsung want to admit there is an issue and do right by it’s customers.  Bell blames Samsung and Samsung blames Bell.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  I sent the phone in but I don’t expect to get it back fixed anytime soon.  I’m pretty disappointed.  I love the device but it’s pretty obvious online that there are a lot of people having problems.

I haven’t decided if I want to sell the device when it comes back or stick with it.  To be honest I’d feel bad about selling the device and it craters on someone else.  It is pretty depressing that I’m finally off work for the holidays, I have time to do some learning, coding and at best now I have the emulator which is pretty limited/slow for what I want to do.

I started writing code a long time ago, so I went through the days where you had to worry about how much memory you had available to you and how you could get your data into your application without causing out of memory issues.  With all the windowing environments and new object oriented languages it’s easy to forget “the good ole days”.

I was reminded this week when I was working on an app I’m writing for Android.  The software I want to write deals with images saved from the device’s camera (or hopefully other images on the device that the user may have imported,etc).  Android has a lot of great functionality around reading and importing bitmaps but I underestimated how well those bitmaps are kept in memory.  I was running out of memory when I wanted to save my manipulated bitmap based off it’s full original size.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to solve the problem until I found this post on the Google forums:

Yes, the images from the camera are 2048px by 1536px.  If you convert

to a bitmap, thats 2048 x 1536 x 2 = 6291456, or 6MB.  This is right

at the allotted space an Activity gets.  If you can live with smaller

images, I would suggest using a sampleSize of > 1 when decoding the

image.  This will result in a smaller image size, thus less memory

used.  I have used the following code in the past to keep my images

under a set byte count.  Alternatively, you could forget about

calculating the sample size and just set it to 2.  This would use

1.5MB instead of 6MB on a standard image.

6MB, that’s not that much, but for a mobile device, yeah I suppose I can see how that is overkill.  I was unaware that the ‘allotted space an Activity gets’ was around 6MB so that is why my app is running out of memory (basically I was trying to allocated 2 uncompressed images in memory.

The posting on Google gives a solution which I’ve tried.  I haven’t spent any time playing with the calculation but I plan on it as the default sizing loses a lot of the image detail.  I have some wiggle room in there because at any one time I’ll only be using 2 images so I can probably bump up the quality/sizing a bit.

I use Jetbrains IntelliJ Idea at work.  I have for quite a while now.  In the early days they didn’t really exist but since starting college and TurboC I’ve used an IDE.  Since I’m spending my free time learning Android development and I know that Jetbrains have an Android plugin for Idea I figured it would be natural to use IntelliJ.  Unfortunately the plugin for Android is pretty simplistic.  It’s not bad (the recent community beta for Idea is pretty flakey) but it leaves a lot to be desired as filling out the XML files for configuration can be a pain without examples.

I know Google recommends Eclipse so I downloaded it instead and while it’s integration with Android is awesome I find the IDE too cluttered, it does TOO many things.  I never though that I’d say it, but sometimes you can have too much functionality and the user can get confused.  Regularly at work I’ve got into arguments with product managers with my statement  “If the user doesn’t want to use the functionality they’ll just ignore it” but in the case of Eclipse you’re so surrounded by all these features that you can’t really escape it.

I don’t really like how projects are laid out either in Eclipse.  It seems like they try to hide the directory structure/layout of your build process with their “projects” mentality but likely it’s because I’m so used to having my code laid out a different way that it’s just foreign to me.

Either way, learning new stuff is fun but can be frustrating when you just learning to walk and you want to run.