Friday, August 17, 2012

Previously on Desk Clock Plus...

It's been a month and a half since the last post.  Work and life in general has had me running like crazy with little time (or motivation) to work on the clock program let alone update the blog.  Since the last post on July 2, here's what's changed:

  • A number of smallish bug fixes that came up from any number of reporting methods (see: How to get a bug fixed.)
  • A quick hot fix because one of things I tried didn't work... 
  • Two new features:
    • Orientation Lock
    • Static background color
  • Caught a potential NULL value
  • Fixed a display bug for 100+ degree days
That brings us up to today's minor update which is just adding 1 minute to the screen saver time out.  I promised this to a user back in December, but I forgot about it.  Sorry!

I have been working on Desk Clock Plus when I can since the last post, but I haven't gotten anywhere really.  The game plan is to break the application up from one big project into a number of smaller libraries and one execution project.  This will then allow me to swap parts of the application out on a version by version basis. The real push for this is the Alarm code which is still based off the 2.2.  I had to maintain that version of code as it pretty much worked for all the different versions of Android.  Google made a major improvement for 2.3 which I'm not using.  The goal is to build a legacy version of the alarm and then other versions for 3.x versions and for 4.x versions.  Libraries are key to keeping all that code manageable by re-using all the common code among 3 different versions.  The problem is the code is so interlaced that can't quite get the code split up correct to avoid circular references (ie two libraries that reference each other, which leads to the chicken vs the egg problem). 

Earlier this week, I came to the conclusion that the on-the-fly design method really wasn't working (there's a big surprise) and I'm going to have to sit down with some design tools and figure out how I can break up the application that works for now and should work for future enchantments.