Major Release on the horizon...

Since May 23rd, updates for Desk Clock plus have been few and far apart (about 4 or 5 in those 5 months).  In that time, I've been working on a pretty major redesign of the main screen.  I haven't changed the look of the application all that much, but the underlying layout has changed a lot which will allow me to add new features quickly and easily.  It's also allowed me to shrink the size of the APK file by 300K or more.

The big feature is the ability to configure the dock (the five icons on the bottom of the screen).  You will soon be able to add more docks (swiping left and right) and add your own applications.  This however will will be an in-app-purchase to enable this new feature.  The in-app-purchase code was truly what had delayed the release of this version.  However, now that's been worked out, I should be able to add more in-app-purchases easily.

I'm happy with the in-app-purchase system that Google has provided (now that it's working).  I feel that it allows me to provide a free basic application for anyone to use and provide additional features for those people willing to pay for them.  I'm not looking to get rich and retire to the beach, but a little extra cash for beer money would be nice.

I also have a list of stack traces that I need to look at (force close and application not responding reports).  I'm not getting a ton of these, but I'm about 2-4 per week, so they need to be addressed.  For the most part it's better error catching for image loading (out of memory, image memory already cleared, etc).

As of 10-3-11 there are 19 Stack traces to look into...

If you happen to notice any other oddities or bugs, leave a comment!

Dark Clock Options

After adding the new feature of dimming the dark clock I had a couple of people email regarding it being too dark or that they didn't want it to dim at all.  I knew when I published that last update about a week ago that I probably should have just waited and added these two options.  So, just a little while ago, I pushed version 0.98.5.11 out to the market with these two new features:

• Dim Time Out -- Allows you to configure when if ever the Dark Clock will dim down.  Choices are Off, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes.
• Dim Level -- Allows you to configure how much the Dark Clock will dim out.  Choices are 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% or 80%.  The previous (and stock default) was 80%.  

Also, I'm happy to note that I've had a pretty decent bump in active installs over the past month (and specifically in the last week).  

It's crazy to me that I've got over one thousand new Active (installed on a device) users in about a week.

I'm close to having the last piece of the next major release done, so hopefully in the next week or two I'll have a  big release to write about.

Turn off that light!

It's funny how feature requests come in pairs.  I had two users email me with in three days of each other both asking about the night clock and dimming the time and turning off the back lighting on the buttons.  So, now the Dark Clock (as I've called it) will dim when the time moves the first time.  If you touch the screen when the time is dimmed then it will return to the normal brightness.  Touching again will exit the dark clock mode.  Hopefully that's what they are looking for...

I realized after pushing the update that I probably should have created options for the amount that it dims and how long it waits until it dims.  Not very hard to do, but it will have to wait until next time.

Also, I'm pretty much done with primary development on the next big enhancement... Dock configuration and adding more buttons.  However, that's going to cost you a dollar...

Minor New Feature

I have been working on some major new enhancements to the Desk Clock over the past two months.  Primary development is about 75% done or so, and I've been pretty happy with the results.  I'm hoping to have it to my beta testers later this week.  In the mean time, I do have one new minor feature that was requested via the comments (although I would prefer to take suggestions via email).  There's now an option to turn on / off the "heartbeat" (blinking colon in the time).  Since this was a pretty simple request, I figured I would take some time and put that in.  The two new text strings are being translated and once that's done I'll publish it to the market.

I'm also on the verge of another milestone, 100 ratings.  All in all, I'm very happy and surprised with the usage.  Google tells me that I've had ~15k downloads and ~3.5k active installs.  It's running in countries all over the world (UK, Germany, India, Korea, Japan, Australia).  Now if I could only get more people to use that donate button...

This is not the update you're looking for...

Just a minor code rearrange to avoid a threading bug.

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!