Desk Clock Plus on your tablet

(Updated 5-5-11)
I was very surprised when I got an email a while back from someone who sent a screen shot of Desk Clock Plus from their rooted nook.  I've gotten some other emails for users regarding the Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab.  Then, Woot had gTablet on sale for cheap and then there were three in my office I could use for testing.  I'm very happy to announce that Desk Clock Plus will display properly on tablet devices.

In addition to the new supported screen sizes and the standard minor bug fixes based upon the force close reports, I've got a couple other new features.

I've had the problem personally where I've asked myself, what's the clock doing?  I see it's moving data, but nothing is happening... So I added bunch of indicator icons to the upper right hand side of the screen.

From left to right:

• Weather -- For when the weather is being loaded or updated
• Picasa Albums -- For when images from your album are being loaded
• Picasa Featured -- For when the featured images from Picasa are being loaded
• Local Images -- For when your local images are being loaded
• Refreshing Image Pool -- After any of the last 3 actions complete, the list of images need to be updated which can take some time depending on the volume of image
• Clean Image Pool -- During some events, the image pool needs to be cleaned (images unloaded, memory cleanup, etc)
• Loading Image -- Loading an image locally or from the web

 The a fore mentioned gTablet has a draw back in that the hacked ROM the guys were using the location service didn't work, so they would never get weather info.  There's a new option that will get the device's IP address and use that to figure out the location.  This however isn't always accurate as during testing, my phone thought I was in New Jersey which is only about 350 miles off...

I've also added an option to use the Slide Show as the screen saver if you're using that functionality.  It was such a simple thing to do, I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier.

Lastly, I've built in a way to override the default dock and buttons without apply a theme.  This is basically creating a custom theme that allows you to use the background flipper as well.  I will update the About Themes page soon, but the basics is that if you put one of the following files in the /DeskClockPlus /DeskClockPlus/Themes folder it will use that file instead of the default.

• dock.png
• alarm.png
• slideshow.png
• darkclock.png
• music.png
• home.png

Next up, there is a known bug with the music button.  Certain music players will not Launch from inside of Desk Clock Plus.  I've done a little research and believe it's an application permissions thing... I don't know for sure and I need to look into it.  The good news is that I've been able to  reproduce it on a co-workers tablet.  I'm also going to implement the Google in app purchasing for donations.

After that, I've got some big changes in mind...