Android Devices

There's been a noticeable lack of development in the past few months with regards to the TWiT for Android and this has been due to a lack of testing hardware at my disposal. The Odroid-T that I was using for testing gave up the ghost. I have been waiting for my desired Android device to become available, the Motorola Milestone 2 (GSM version of the Droid 2). While it hasn't become available in Canada yet it has been released in Europe. This afternoon I placed an order with eXpansys UK for a sim-free (unlocked) Milestone 2. Hopefully it will be here by the end of next week!

Market Fluctuations

Today Google announced that developers from more countries can sign up for Google Checkout Merchant accounts to sell apps on the Android Market. This is exciting as I have thus far been entertaining alternative methods of monetization such as advertising, referrals and donations.

This also raises new questions such as whether or not to have a free "demo" version of apps, a free ad supported version and what features from the pay version should be present in the free versions.

v0.75 Released

Just published v0.75, some notable changes are that the playback of the stream will now mute while a phone call is active. The dashboard now has much larger buttons which I added based on feedback from users. A bug that existed in v0.7 that would cause the app to crash when it had an error playing the stream has been corrected, the app will not push a notification to alert the user of the error.  If you already have an IRC client that listens for irc:// intents it should be opened automatically instead of using the web client that will be used as a fallback. I don't know of any IRC clients for Android that listen for irc:// but if you find one let me know. 

3 stars - "Really needs A exit close app button."

What's with the one guy that goes through the Android Market and rates every app as 3 stars - "Really needs A exit close app button"? None of the apps on Android need an exit button. It's a waste of screen space and Google designed Android's multitasking not to require that the app be closed manually.

Don't take my word for it. Go to the source. This Radioactive Yak article explains it quite nicely. The author's an Android Developer Advocate employed by Google in case you failed to notice that in his About Me tab.

There shall never be a button named "Exit" wasting valuable screen real estate in any of my Android apps. Don't bother asking for one.  Press the Home key instead.

Don't Panic!

Nothing causes panic to an Android developer more than the fear that they accidently deleted the keystore file used to sign their applications when there's no backup of it. Now there is a backup and there is an updated version of the TWiT app.

The update should improve some of the delay of loading new Activities (views) and removes the rather pointless view of of the Player moving the Play and Stop controls to the action bar. There will still be some delay loading the Chat and Calendar views as they have to pull webcontent down to the Android Device.