Still alive!
We’ve got two major updates: one quite technical, and the other only for a select group of devices, but still :)
Background stuff:
Blipfoto changed their API (the thingy we use to contact blipfoto and get the goods), and until now we still used the old one (boooh). Some changes were needed to fix up AndroBlip for the new API, and as not all changes were too clear, we needed lots of testing.
Big devices, Big Screens, High definition, Pixelmania!
If you own a Samsung Galaxy Note, or any other device with loooaaads of pixels, you used to get a ‘tiny’ app that was letterboxed to a small size. But not anymore! The stretching-gnomes fixed the images, so it’s now always as big as possible. I hope.
Getting AndroBlip 2.2
1. Download AndroBlip on the Android market (small fee of 0,99 euro)
2. Download from the Website (apk): Androblip 2.2.0 (free).
ChangeLog
New Features
- Support for Large screens sizes
Updates
- We’re now using the blipfoto API version 2.0
Bugfixes
- Removed duplicate newlines in entries.
Have fun with this new release and please drop us a line to let us know what you think of it. If you have any requests for new features or encountered strange behaviour we’d love to hear it!
How hard can it be?
The taskbar is all new and shiney in Windows 7 but it appears that it’s really hard for these newfangled collections of open-and-closed programs to just allow a shortcut. Ubuntu has Unity and one of the first things I came across was that I couldn’t keep some programs in the ‘taskbar’on the left (I don’t really know how Ubuntu calls it) . Same goes for Eclipse in Windows it seems. I’m using a 64 bit version of both Windows and Eclipse. Eclipse version is 4.1.1
It’s a bug!
After some google-fu I found this ‘double entry in the taskbar’ bug. The bug is not the same (“Eclipse icon is duplicated in taskbar”), but it seems the problem has the same cause and we can actually use one of the tricks down in the comments! Winz. My guess is the origional bug starts when you upgrade your Eclipse and allready have an Icon: then you have an icon you use to start eclipse, which makes a second non-pinable entry in the taskbar. To get from there to ‘my’ problem: just remove the first pin :)
Getting the “pin to taskbar” to show
From this comment by ‘riccardo’ we can figure out that an extra line or 2 is needed in the eclipse.ini file. Adding the location of the VM should fix all your sores.
- If you haven’t: remove any old pinned eclipse icons.
- Find your eclipse directory, and the eclipse.ini file.
- Add the following 2 lines:
-vm disk:\path\to\JRE\bin
- Save
- Run, and wait for the main screen to show (so not the splash or the workspace chooser)
- Right click, choose pin, have a drink.
These are the complete contents of my current eclipse.ini file:
-vm C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin -startup plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar --launcher.library plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.100.v20110502 -showsplash org.eclipse.platform --launcher.XXMaxPermSize 256m --launcher.defaultAction openFile -vmargs -Xms40m -Xmx384m
After starting eclipse the first lines were automagically changed to this, but I don’t really think that matters :)
-vm C:/Program Files/Java/jre7/bin
Troubles
Things can go wrong. You can read the comments of the linked bug above, but some common problems are:
- Not giving the ‘-vm’ and ‘path’ lines a separate line.
- Unstable behavior of Eclipse. Haven’t gotten that, but if you do, you can remove the ‘-vm’ line after pining.
- If you update your JRE, you might need to update the path too in your ini, I’m not really sure.
- Some people need a full reboot for any of this to work. (I didn’t by the way)
Spotted by Ilse and by Ian Wright: uploading with a custom date was broken! A quick fix for this. Get it at the download page!
Changes:
- Fixed the custom date bug.
- A small notice telling you about having no new comments (the older “see comments even when they are not new” feature was removed from the API by blipfoto, so I can’t show those anymore.)
We have been using a QR code as seen on the left with our release posts here since version 1.0 came out in May last year. Yesterday we came across an article about putting images in QR codes in Google Reader and so we thought it might be fun to try and make our image a bit more interesting by adding our logo.
It turns out it is not hard at all. Just generate a QR code with a high enough level of error correction (we used 30% and generated the QR code here), put a small image in the center and you’re done!
So now we proudly present our new, recognisable AndroBlip QR code! Try it :-)
As I’ve said before in other places: statistics are cool. So here are some numbers for you! These are available to us developers in the Android market.
Devices
| 1 | HTC Desire | 21.0% |
| 2 | Samsung Galaxy S | 8.2% |
| 3 | HTC Desire HD | 7.9% |
| 4 | HTC Wildfire | 7.5% |
| 5 | Motorola Droid X | 4.3% |
| 6 | HTC Sensation 4G | 3.3% |
| 7 | HTC Desire S | 3.3% |
| 8 | SEMC Xperia X10 | 2.3% |
| 9 | Samsung Galaxy S | 2.3% |
| 10 | Samsung Galaxy S2 | 2.3% |
As you can see, the HTC-Desire is having a big lead! Of course people are running Android on those devices (No, really? Yeah, really :) ). More than 50% run 2.2, but there’s also a 1.5 hidden in the userbase somewhere:
OS versions
| 1 | Android 2.2 | 51.5% |
| 2 | Android 2.3.3 | 26.2% |
| 3 | Android 2.1 | 12.8% |
| 4 | Android 1.6 | 1.7% |
| 5 | Android 1.5 | 1.0% |
| 6 | Android 2.3 | 0.7% |
| 7 | Android 3.0 | 0.3% |
Again with the updates. The previous update didn’t fix the notification bug, I hope this one does.
Check out the latest download post for full download-instructions and a link to 2.1.4.
And specially for ‘Andy’: If you really can’t hold out for the fixes to come in and you think old versions are better: you can download those too if you want. Just scroll down on that download link for any version you like! There’s no need for uninstalling just because you like an older version better :D
Sorry for the updating-spree, but there’s a fix for that too: lets call our development “agile” and then its not a problem anymore, it’s a feature!
Anyway, just like the comments bugfix (2.1.2), I had to make another patch: It seems that for some people the notifications won’t stop coming. Now I don’t know If we have covered all the problems, as some reports were less easy to recreate than others, but at least some problems should be fixed. Again, thanks for all reports and information given!
Take a look at the last download post for full download-instructions :D
Changes:
- Changed preferences so no notifications (of either type) will be shown
- Preferences interface update (you don’t need to select if a notification makes a sound, if you don’t want any notifications)
- Bugfix for persistent notifications, even when they are turned off.
- Possible update on notification persistence when notifications are on. Hard to recreate though.
Just a quick message:
It seems there are a still a bit of loose ends, and one of them was a commenting-problem. I’ve fixed it and uploaded version 2.1.2. Check out the download area
It is on the market, so will go to those who got it from there soon :)
A big thanks to the people who submitted a bugreport on their phone, and to JJFA who dropped us an email :D
Actually, quite a big update technically! The change-log is below, but we’ve got (android) notifications & in-app icons to show new comments/notifications. Also there’s an auto-save feature that saves your current title/description if you exit the upload page without sending your blip. Even more: you can now click on left/right side of images to go to the next/previous image, subscribe to a user, favourite an image, and of course a lot of bug-fixes and minor updates.
Getting AndroBlip 2.1
1. Download AndroBlip on the Android market (small fee of 0,99 euro)
2. Download from the Website (apk): Androblip 2.1.5 (free).
ChangeLog
New Features
- Subscribe to journal (press menu while viewing an entry)
- Mark entry as favourite (press menu while viewing an entry) (Only available for blipfoto full members).
- Autosave. Saving title, description and tags of an upload when leaving the screen without uploading.
- (android) Notifications. Notify you of new comments and notifications in the status bar, as well as on the main screen (confusing that the android feature is called “notification” and the blipfoto feature also :) ).
- Tags are now shown with entries on the exif/tags popup
You might notice that we are requesting an extra permission to “start on boot”. This is needed to restart the notification when you reboot, without you having to first start-up AndroBlip manually. If you have turned the notification off this will not do anything.
Updates
- Enforcing the limit on title-length (50 characters)
- Enforcing limit on amount of entries retrieved (90)
- Clickable tags showing search-result for that tag
Bugfixes
- Special characters work better now. (reported by ~dr )
- Force close bug reported trough google market fixed (NullPointerException)
- Retrieve-journal-after-clicking-on-a-name-bug that was reported on the site should be fixed (affectionately known as the “judith”-bug)
- Changed method to retrieve specific journals to something that actually makes sense
- Fixed padding on comments screen
- New about page
Have fun with this new release and please drop us a line to let us know what you think of it. If you have any requests for new features or encountered strange behaviour we’d love to hear it!
New project, new problems.
Another minor fix you “just need to know”. After some server changes (I moved my SVN installation for one), I decided to just start a new Eclipse project as opposed to ‘fixing’ the old one to the new SVN location.
My basic steps are somewhat like:
- Make a new Android project with some fake settings
- Connect to SVN
- Team->revert the hell out of it
Most of the time this works well.
The problem:
There seems to be a class missing, but there isn’t:
After having all the files, the application still doesn’t work. It compiles and goes to the emulator nicely, but then this happens:
ERROR/AndroidRuntime(287): java.lang.RuntimeException:
Unable to instantiate activity ComponentInfo{packageNameGoesHere}:
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException:
packageName.ClassName in loader
dalvik.system.PathClassLoader@44e7a8a8
And:
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException:
packageName.ClassName in
loader dalvik.system.PathClassLoader@44e7a8a8
at dalvik.system.PathClassLoader.findClass
(PathClassLoader.java:243)
No fun at all.
This error is quite obvious: it calls a certain class that cannot be found. In this case it was the class of my main activity. Not a thing that would be easily to miss. It was there in the source of course, no errors in sight, etc, but it still didn’t register as being there. This is of course a warning sign that something is wrong with your building path. But what?
The Solution
For some reason Eclipse had decided that -as opposed to every sane default- my /src folder didn’t need to be in my build-path. Easily fixed if you this is the problem:
- Open the build-path (right-mouse on the project -> build-path -> configure build path, or project-properties-> Java Build Path)
- Click the Source tab.
- Make sure your /gen and your /src paths are listed there.
- While you’re at it, if you use google analytics, make sure that libGoogleAnalytics.jar is present in the libraries tab!
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