Hello IT... Yes, the programmer messed up.

I've been meaning to post this for a week now (wow, time flies when work kicks your ass).  The problem looks to have been due to a change in the launch app when undocked feature that was added for the scrolling dock extension.  It basically boiled down to not encasing things correctly in curly braces {}.  I didn't catch it because I didn't test the app outside the dock (yes, I know bad programmer!).  The app launched and it checked the state of the device to see if it was in the dock.  When the answer was no I check to see if if was launched from the dock.  When the answer to that is no, it shouldn't do anything, but the missing curly braces caused it to exit.  When you do VB .NET for a living, those little things will get you when you're not used to it.

Now for a bit of good news, I finished (what I think) is the last new feature for the scrolling dock.  I'm happy to introduce: Tablet Mode.

Screen shot provided by the super awesome Aussie commenter Omniwolf.  I will be happy to purchase him a beer (or any other beverage of his choice) if I ever travel there!

The Tablet Mode will extend the dock the entire width of the screen and provide a smooth continuous (instead of five icons at a time) listing of your applications.  Tablet mode will only display the applications and actions that you have configured (ie you will not see a blank plus icon).  So, if you only have seven buttons configured, you will only see those seven buttons repeated.  Currently, there is no long press menu when you are in Tablet Mode, as I'm not sure it would work well in this case.  If you are using a theme, you may want to go back and re-download the theme to pick up the tablet dock background image (if applicable to the theme).

The last note about all of this, when I released the hot fix for the app closing issue, I had all of the Tablet Mode code in place but hidden from activation.  I started to get a bunch of error logs in due to some of the Tablet Mode changes, but by the time I realized that the code had changed to the point where I couldn't exactly pin point the issue.  I think that I have them fixed or trapped, but I'm not 100% sure, so if you have problems with the app force closing or if tablet mode just doesn't turn on for you, please let me know.  If I get an error log via the market with the latest version I'll be able to track it down and get it fixed.

What's next?  I'm going to go into maintenance mode for a little while.  I have a couple of minor bug reports that I need to look into.  The Theme Downloader sucks and needs to be looked at.  After that, I'm going to work on the advanced weather add-on.

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...