Last one... I swear... until the next one

I found two little bugs one dealing with the display on a larger phone (IE the new Droid X2) that was just setting the dock to center.  The other one was little more odd, I noticed that the slide show would sometimes display the local images when it wasn't supposed to.  This turned out to be an invalid default value, so I need to add a little more brains to making the choice to show local images or not for the slide show.

Seriously, going to start on the extensions... not fixing anything else... until I find something else that's broken.

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention the new 'Vintage Flag' them available for download from the theme browser.  I tried something different with the icons and I'm not 100% sold on them. 

Opinions welcome!

Milestone

Over the weekend at some point Desk Clock Plus reached the next plateau in the Android Market, over 10,000 downloads since I first released it mid December.  Obviously, that's not 'Angry Birds' type numbers, but it still it averages out to be about 55 downloads a day or about 1600 per month.  It's still kind of crazy to me that many people have tried out my app and 2000+ have it installed on their device. 

Just some quick notes about the last couple of updates:

• Re-sized the "night clock" for tablet devices, the font size should be the same as when it's in landscape mode.
• Apparently the colon color wasn't being set either... 
• Updated PayPal API after it caused a Force Close.
• After I re-localized the strings, I introduced a string bug that caused force closes on non-English devices (Désolé pour ça!)
• I'm also now doing some more work to verify that I have the correct intent when the music application is set, this came to light with the Google Music 3.0 launch.
• Andrew C. sent me screen shot of Desk Clock Plus on his Galaxy Tab and there was some screen layout issues.  The portrait view I know is fixed, I made some other changes to the landscape view, but I haven't been able to verify them, so please email me if your display is messed up for a 'large' tablet device.
• Gary M. requested that the weather not show NA when no weather info can be found.  This is an issue for him as he said: "I'm on holiday with no internet access".  The first thing I thought of was "a holiday with no internet access... that sounds really good right now!"
• Finally, there's an extra permission request for the Fine location (GPS).  I did this to increase the chance that I could find your location for the weather without having to resort to the IP address which is rather in accurate.

I don't think there's going to be very many if any updates for a while.  I'm going to be working on some in-app paid extensions, but more about that at a later time.

Thanks again to everyone who has downloaded and uses Desk Clock Plus!

Curse you PayPal!

I looked at the Developer Console this afternoon and I noticed I had a new Force Close report... Something inside of the PayPal API ran out of memory.  So, the last update have some error trapping around the PayPal stuff and I updated the PayPal code to the the latest 1.1.1 version.

I was also informed that I didn't re-size the night clock for the tablet screens.  That's also been fixed in the latest update.

More than meets the eye...

Here's a picture of Desk Clock Plus running on a Asus Transformer

It's running the "Grapes" theme.  I actually to that picture here.

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...

Update, Update, Update... Failure... Update

I did another update of all three of my applications on Friday.  The updates to the Launch Bar(s) was pretty minor, but important.  I was looking for a better way to save the intent (how to call the application).  I actually found a good post on stack overflow on how to do this by saving the URI information.  So I put that into both versions and things seem to working well.

I made a big change to the Desk Clock Plus application two (?) weeks ago now.  I was really happy with what I was able to do with integrating my desk clock program and Picasa.  I'm using Picasa in 3 different ways:

1. Use the featured images (top 20) as part of the backgrounds.
2. I'm using my Picasa account to host a bunch of themes.
3. You can display Images from Picasa for your background and / or slide show.

I was very proud of what I was able to do and was planning  a big post explaining all of it and I just never sat down and wrote it (real work and home have been very busy lately).

I kept tinkering with the code and putting in fixes for for the force close reports that were coming in.  I made a change that I'm hoping should fix some of the random force closes when the Desk Clock is not the main application, however, this caused another issue when the application is closed (removed from the dock or the back button is pressed).  I really didn't have time to do anything with it until today, but I do want to thank all 36 people who sent in the Force Close report!  I know I've said it in the past, but I need to stop pushing updates on Friday, it seems that when I do there's some kind of bug that goes out too.

I've been thinking of what's next...  Given all that I've learned in the past nine months or so, I the launch bar could probably be re-written better. For Desk Clock Plus, I'll more than likely, I'll probably do one more enhancement for skinning,  probably draw up a large screen layout and prompt the user launch the location and security screen when a location can't be detected.

Globalization

It's a big buzz word around my office for my real job.  It wasn't really something that I thought about when I started the android development.  However, when I used some of the Google clock code as a base for my clock, the localized strings came with it, so my desk clock was half globalized.

Last week, Paul from the Netherlands emailed me regarding the force close issues.  Fortunately, I think I have the issue resolved*.  We traded some emails and I got a small list of "wouldn't it be nice if".  Which, once again, is something I'm used to with my real job.  His first comment was the date formatting, I naturally formatted the date Month, Day and he would like it formatted Day, Month.  The change to the formatting is nothing, but the question is when to do it.  What's cool is that there's a function getDateFormatOrder that will return a character array with how to format the date.

His other request was for the weather conditions to be localized.  I'm getting my weather information from yahoo, parsing the XML return, and stuffing the value of Condition into the text box.  I tried to see if I could pass Yahoo a language ID and have it return the localize conditions, but no dice.  So, I opted to use the condition code and then get the string from inside my application.  Paul offered to translate the conditions into Dutch and all looked like it was good.  After typing out all 43 conditions in English yesterday, I wasn't looking forward to doing the same thing in Dutch today.  So, after some searching I found some really cool tools:

1. App Localizer  This nifty web page you can copy and paste your XML strings file into a text box and tell it what language you want and after some google translating you get a translated XML file back.  It's pretty awesome (and pretty quick too).
2. Androlate BETA  This is a plug in for Eclipse that will do the same thing but in line.  It is still beta, but I thought it worked pretty damned well, although I thought it was a bit slower than the App Localizer web page.  There was some goofiness with how I had to do things since I have my strings broken up in to multiple files, but all in all I'm happy with it.

So, I have the Desk Clock Plus application completely localized in Dutch, German and Spanish.  After I push it out to the market I'll have Paul check it out and if all looks good then I'll have it go to town on all the 2.2 languages.

*Another user reported that his previously working Droid 2 isn't working anymore once it gets docked... no rest for the wicked...