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.

So I finally got back into developing some Android code, I have some projects in mind but since I”m a lazy mofo I won’t talk about them until I feel like they’re turning out how I want.  Typically when I start a new project I think of splitting the key functionality of the application into pieces then start doing some reading and googling to see how to do those pieces.  Then it becomes a matter of taking those pieces and putting them together.

I did some reading on how to do multi-touch.  Pinch to zoom, drag, that sort of thing.  I downloaded the latest beta for JetBrain’s IntelliJ because I knew they had the Android framework included, and I had used their framework in an earlier version (8.x) and it worked fine with the emulator, albeit slow.

I found an interesting article online regarding how to do multi-touch and proceeded to copy/paste some of the code into my project.  After getting everything built properly I proceeded to run my app.  For some reason my app wasn’t showing up.  I know the emulator is slow but damn..  I started looking through IntelliJ’s logs to see if I was missing something and the log says .. my app is running.   WTF?!  Well it turns out that I had my phone plugged in and the Android SDK connector (ADB) automatically uploaded my app to the phone.  I turn the screen on and there it is.  Funny that I totally forgot that the phone was plugged in and that I had USB debugging turned on by default.  Even more exciting was that the process was instant, no more waiting 5 minutes for the emulator to start.  Fantastic stuff.

I found this interesting post on another Android developer’s website (Steven Osborn):

Android 2.2 isUserAMonkey() check

Per the documentation: Returns “true” if the user interface is currently being messed with by a monkey.

There is another gem in the Log class, they’ve added a new log level ‘wtf‘ which in this case means “What a Terrible Failure”

Great stuff, pretty easy to tell the Google developers are geeks like myself, I love shit like that in source code, makes writing stuff a lot more fun.

So last week after much complaining from myself to my wife I was able to get a phone, as my earlier posts suggest.  I bought a used phone from Kijiji (which is popular in Canada). I liked the idea of buying a phone used for several reasons:

1. Someone else pays the tax
2. Usually they have bought accessories that they’ll give away since they’re useless without the phone
3. Lets the buyer choose the service provider choose who will give the best price for cell phone usage

The issue here was that the phone I was interested in was the Samsung Galaxy S.  Which on paper looks great but online has questionable reviews regarding Samsung’s terrible implementation of AndroidOS and a bad reputation regarding supporting their devices after they’ve been sold.  Samsung typically has the mentality of “sell it and then we’ll drop support and recommend people buy are new product”… Case in point, with the SGS (Galaxy S) they’ve been promising the latest OS upgrade (v2.2 Froyo) since September yet most of the markets still have NOT gotten the update.

I bought the device mostly due to the hacking community.  Typically when you buy a mobile or PDA type device you want to make sure that it will be supported.  I figured that since Samsung has sold SGS devices in over 120 countries and on every major provider in North America the hacking comunity would pick up for Samsung’s lack of support, with an audience of that many countries/providers I figured that the device would have a pretty big following.

For the most part I was right, however I underestimated how important the basic communication and open-sourced-ness of manufacturer->community is.  Samsung hasn’t been very forthcoming on their open source code for their implementation of the Android OS, and from what I read a lot of their code isn’t written very well.  This doesn’t mean I have buyers remorse, just that I underestimated how important the manufacturer’s involvement is.

Nonetheless I had the device for a little while and was curious how difficult it would be use use a hacked ROM on my phone.  The device came with 2.1 and I wanted to try 2.2.  There were enough interesting addons to 2.2 that I felt compelled to hack the device and see if I could get 2.2 running on it.  My first dabbles in this idea were to root the phone, the previous owner had unlocked it so the ‘seal’ had already been broken I figured it was worth trying to root the device. Rooting an Android phone is similar to ‘jailbreaking’ your iPhone/iPod.  It opens up the device’s capability beyond what the manufacturer had designed/planned for it to do.  This is typically dangerous because often if you’re not careful you can ‘brick’ or permanently damage the device beyond using it.  This is made even more dangerous for me because I bought it used without warranty so if I ‘bricked’ my device I would have a difficult type trying to get the original seller to fix it or replace it.  Still, being the geek that I am I figured it was worth the try.

Now the SGS has some issues, my biggest concern was that I would run into these issues before I even got very far in the hacking process.. that I would hit the issues and get confused if it was my hacking or the issues that caused me to ‘brick‘ my device.  I threw caution to the wind and decided to proceed with applying a new ROM that would upgrade my device to 2.2 OS.  Everything went well, sometimes I can follow instructions and the device started up with 2.2 and I started reinstalling my software that did not make the initial transition from 2.1 -> 2.2.  On a whim though I decided to try using the phone and it worked except I could not accept incoming calls.  I figured this wasn’t an issue and felt the ‘hacking community’ would help me out but after 12 hours of reading, researching, questioning and debating I found that there was no way I could fix the device.  I was frustrated because everything was working perfectly, GPS connection was fantastic, SMS worked, battery life seemed great, I enjoyed the new 2.2 features around Flash, etc, but without incoming calls the device lost a lot of it’s functionality.  I was unsure how to go back to the old 2.1 and I didn’t know how to fix what I had for 2.2.  I was disappointed that I had semi-bricked my phone and no idea how to fix it.

On a whim I decided to try another ROM and magically it worked.  The phone restarted, quickly I retried incoming calls.. WORKED, outgoing calls WORKS, SMS, WORKS, GPS WORKS.  The battery life isn’t as good as the last ROM but it’s usable and lets me enjoy the phone for now until a new ROM comes out that has better community support.  I learned a lot in the process, not only how a lot on how to hack Android devices but also that persistence pays off.

My device started out looking like this:

Starting ROM

And ended up finally looking like this:

What my current ROM looks like.