that’s whacked

Gesture Lock

Saturday, Nov 13. 2010  –  Category: Musings

(Just want a link to the app in the market? Scan the QR code to the right or click here)

While I was on vacation last week eating my way through Taiwan I kept whipping out my phone to take photos.  Trouble is, I’d keep unlocking my phone, swiping my home screens or switching to the apps launcher to launch one of the many camera apps I have installed (RetroCamera, FX Camera, or the built in Camera).  Or I’d grab my phone to check into Foursquare, or tweet, or write notes… or pretty much anything.  The one thing in common with all these tasks?

I knew exactly what I wanted to do everytime I took my phone out.

Yet each time I was unlocking, and then swiping around to find the app and then launching it.  In the case of a camera app that means losing precious seconds of the moment I’m trying to capture.  Soooo it occurred to to see if I could find a lock screen that would enable me to just use gestures to unlock and automatically launch apps.  The closest I found was some lock screen that came on some old Samsung devices (though seemingly not on the Galaxy S I had).. and even that was limited to hard-coded “letter” gestures.

What to do, what to do?  I’m an Android nut/nerd, so figured I’d write my own… and after a couple days of hacking, I finished it up today.  So without further ado, I present Gesture Lock, now available in the Android Market for 99 cents.  I might make a limited free version available later, but was too lazy to do it now.  Here’s a couple of screenshots:

This is the main launcher app.  This is where you can define custom gestures for unlocking the screen, and mapping to any available app you have installed.  It also has a preferences screen for a few basic prefs: enabling/disabling Gesture Lock (of course), toggling the clock between 24/12 hour clock, and enabling/disabling the notification bar.  I leave mine enabled so I can see things like email, text messages, tweets, battery status, etc. – but the caveat of this is that the notification bar is then draggable.  Convenient, but less secure.  Disabling it is more secure, but less convenient.  Trade-off.  Meh.

This is what the lock screen looks like with a sample gesture drawn.  Super convenient, unlock, and launch your app without delay.

If you install the app and find any issues or have some comments/suggestions, I’d appreciate any feedback here…

ConnectIn 1.1.1 & HTC Sense UI

Tuesday, Sep 28. 2010  –  Category: Musings

I pushed 1.1.1 to the Market last night which fixes a few things:

• Only auto-sync once a day (LinkedIn enforces a 5000/day total limit for third-party apps, so I have to knock this down so as not to hit it.  You can still manually refresh as frequently as you like via the Launcher app if you want/need to poke it.
• Make the new “in” notification that appears during sync optional.
• Handle API errors (such as the throttling limit) from LinkedIn gracefully, and notify the user when they occur
• Make a separate Settings screen accessible from the Launcher app for managing sync notification & contact integration
• Fix crash when trying to view profiles for contacts that had no photo

• In-app profile viewer to view location, summary, specialties, and associations.  (Education & positions coming soon)
• Main app launcher to add/remove account and manually trigger a sync.
• Auto-sync and refresh profiles phone numbers and headlines when syncs are triggered.

ConnectIn

Saturday, Sep 25. 2010  –  Category: Android

While my day job has been working on the Rdio Android app, I’ve continued hacking on other random Android related things on the side to learn about the other aspects of the platform I haven’t touched yet. One of the things I love about Android is the ability for apps to deeply integrate into the system. On an iPhone or Blackberry you can tell where the boundary is between phone and app. Startup the Phone Book/Contacts on a Blackberry or iPhone and you know you’re looking at something built by RIM or Apple. On Android when you start the Contacts app, the contacts you see are being populated by your Google Contacts, Twitter, Facebook, etc. While I’ve been working on the Rdio Android app, I came across the section on how to write SyncAdapters to sync contacts from the cloud into your Android contacts…

Meanwhile, back in the world of social networking… one of the places I keep a profile is LinkedIn. I’ve found it to be a useful resource and a great professional social network. I thought it’d be really handy to integrate that into my Android Contacts… so 1+1=2 and a few days of hacking later, I’ve built the ConnectIn app.

It syncs your LinkedIn connections into your Android contacts, notably it syncs over phone numbers, photos, status updates, and “headlines” (which are the “Senior Muckity-Muck at Foobazco, inc.” title things). It also adds a link to invoke the browser to load the full profile. I’ve released the initial version in the Android market for $0.99 (USD). It’ll be an interesting experiment… I’ve never sold software before (at least not directly).

Some features I plan on implementing: an in-app profile viewer (rather than kicking directly off to the browser), people search, and whatever else I think of that seems interesting and relevant. Anyway, if you have 99 cents to blow and want to check it out, scan the QR code to the right.

Once you install it, it’ll be accessible via your System Settings > Accounts & Sync screen. Click the Add Account, and you should see a LinkedIn account type. Click that and you’ll be walked through the LinkedIn OAuth authorisation process. Once that’s done it’ll automatically start syncing in the background. To actually display the contacts go to your Contacts app and go to the Display option in the menu to enable display of LinkedIn contacts. On HTC phones using Sense UI, you’ll want to use the People Search app instead of Contacts.

Update 09/27: I just pushed version 1.1.0 to the market last night which should fix a bunch of the Sense UI issues including contacts not showing up in the regular People app.

Proguard, Android, Ant, and 3rd party external JARs

Wednesday, Sep 22. 2010  –  Category: Android, Code, Musings

I’ll keep this short and sweet. Dan Galpin covered in a recent blog post how to drop in Proguard & Ant to easily do Android app builds. One hitch is that it doesn’t work for apps that have third party external jars. The simple fix to get this working is to change the libraryjars line from:

-libraryjars ${libraryjarpath}

to

-libraryjars ${external.libs.dir}:${libraryjarpath}

p.s. why are all the Android dev blogs posted only by Tim Bray and not the authors directly? p.p.s. why can’t we leave comments on the blog posts?

Android UI… fragmentation?

Tuesday, Aug 3. 2010  –  Category: Android, Code, Musings, Rdio

Perhaps fragmentation isn’t the right word… but this issue certainly confuses me.  It seems trendy to throw about the term ‘platform fragmentation’ as it pertains to Android, so I’ll capitalise on that buzzword and go with that for now.  (To be fair, I’d love to be proven wrong and will happily eat my words if someone can point out a better way I should be addressing this).  While developing the Rdio Android app, I’ve been testing on a bunch of different devices and frankly, with generally stock widgets in use, I’m running into the problem where widgets look different on each device.  This wouldn’t be so much an issue, except often times the differences are visual/stylistic tweaks in things like background images or colours which cause our design assets (icons, text colour, etc.) to look bad on one or more devices.

Case in point: TabWidget.  Using a completely stock TabWidget on our app which has minSdkVersion 4 and targetSdkVersion 6, I get the following:

Android 2.2 on Nexus One

Android 2.1 + Sense UI on HTC Droid Incredible

Android 2.1 + Sense UI on HTC Hero

Android 2.1 + Motoblur on Motorola Droid X

In each above screenshot, the leftmost tab is selected (i.e. active/current), the centre tab is focused/pressed (i.e. my finger is currently holding it down but I haven’t released it, while the rightmost tab is unselected.

As you can see from the above images, things like the selected and unselected tab icons look fine on the Motoblur and Hero with Sense UI, but look like crap on the Droid Incredible with Sense UI and stock Android on the Nexus One.  Meanwhile text colour looks fine on Motoblur, looks passable on the stock Android, looks mostly awful on the Droid Incredible with Sense UI, and is completely unusable on the Hero with Sense UI.

One option we have available to us is to hardcode all our own widget styles, which means completely skipping the system look and feel.  This is great for the Rdio brand (i.e. we can use our own highlight colours, etc.).. but this is like going back to the days of the 1337 90s when we were all cool kids in college running Litestep, XFCE, GNOME, etc. and only apps with custom themes and skins.  At some point it gets old, we grow up, and we want apps that match the system styles.  I don’t mind mobile apps having their unique personality, but I don’t want widgets having their own custom look and feel.  I want a ListView in one Android app to look and behave like ListViews in other Android apps.  Ditto that for TabWidgets, Buttons, etc.

But how are we supposed to do that if there isn’t a standard widget style we can rely on?  Am I just missing something painfully obvious about system-wide styles I should be using?  And what about custom widgets?  For example, in the above screenshots, each album art is clickable and relies on a “button” like look and feel to it… but buttons on stock Android use orange focus/select/press states, while on Sense UI they use green, and on Motoblur they use red.  We need to make custom graphics (in this case a 9patch drawable) for this, so are we expected to make one version for every vendor?

What are other Android developers doing to get around these annoying vendor-specific extensions and styles to the Android UI?

Building & simulating Blackberry apps with the Blackberry SDK on Mac OS X

Wednesday, Jun 2. 2010  –  Category: Development, Rdio

As I recently blogged, I just started working at Rdio. Specifically I’m working on the Android app. A fair amount of code is shared between our Android & Blackberry app (since they both use a common platform of Java). Since I’ve been making changes to the Android code, I wanted to be able to build the Blackberry app to make sure I didn’t regress or break anything there.

I’ve got a shiny new MacBook Pro, and well… it just feels like sacrilege to be running Windows on this thing. So I set out to see if I could get the latest Blackberry SDK working on OS X. And… well, it works! Requisite screenshot:

I owe a huge amount to this blog post, which I used and simply updated and hacked around with the latest rev of the SDK… I can’t claim much creativity for my steps since it’s clearly a derivative of azizuysal’s work.

Downloads

• Eclipse 3.5 (I used the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers package)
• Blackberry SDK/JDE for Eclipse (As of the time of this writing, I got BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe)
• bb-ant-tools (I got bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip)
• mpowerplayer (I got build 1185)

SDK & ant Setup

1. Install Eclipse wherever.  It doesn’t matter where.
2. Create a Blackberry directory for your Eclipse workspace and to hold the SDK.  I used /Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry.
3. Launch Eclipse and specify that directory (/Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry) as your workspace directory.
4. Launch a terminal and do the following:
   1. mkdir $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   2. cd /tmp
   3. unzip $HOME/Downloads/mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
      unzip mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
   4. unzip $HOME/Downloads/BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe
      1. (this will create two directories: InstallerData & Windows)
   5. unzip InstallerData/Disk1/InstData/Resource1.zip “C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar”
      1. (this will create a retardedly long subdirectory path, as you can see)
   6. unzip C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar
      1. (this will create two subdirectories: features & plugins)
   7. rm -rf C_ InstallerData Windows features
   8. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   9. mkdir net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   10. cd net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   11. unzip /tmp/plugins/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25.jar
   12. mv /tmp/mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify components/bin
   13. chmod +x components/bin/preverify
   14. cd ..
   15. mkdir bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   16. cd bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   17. unzip $HOME/Downloads/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip
   18. rm -rf /tmp/plugins /tmp/mpp-sdk
5. Now go back to Eclipse, and go to the Eclipse>Preferences menu
6. Go to Java>Build Path>User Libraries and click New
   1. Enter “Blackberry 1.1.2″ as the library name.
   2. Click Add Jars and select $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/lib/netrimapi.jar
   3. Then select Javadoc location and choose the $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/docs/api directory
7. Go to Ant>Runtime in the Eclipse preferences
   1. Under Global Entries, click Add External Jars
   2. Choose $HOME/ws/Blackberry/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin/bb-ant-tools.jar
8. Click Okay and save the Preferences
9. Add $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/bin to your PATH via your .bashrc file

Building Hello World

1. Follow the exact steps (heck, use his sample code) in the blog I linked to above.  It works perfectly.
2. Only hitch is make sure to update the jde.home & simulator.home properties in your build.xml to the right paths of course.

Running the Simulator

1. Call me nuts, but I didn’t feel like install MacPorts.  Instead, I built my own Wine from source.  To do this, just follow the instructions here.  I installed it to /usr/local.
2. Grab winetricks and put it somewhere in your path (curl http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks > $HOME/bin/winetricks)
3. Install various winetricks packages:
   1. gdiplus msxml3 msxml4 msxml6
   2. (yes really, I had to install all 3 for some reason.  I have no idea why)
4. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.0_5.0.0.25/components/simulator
5. cat 9550.bat | sed -e ‘s/^M//’ > 9550.sh
   1. note the ^M isn’t a literal ^M, it’s the ctrl code for <Return>, hit Ctrl-V and then the Return key to generate it.
6. Edit the 9550.sh file and make it look like:
   1. #!/bin/sh
   2. cd “dirname $0“
   3. /usr/local/bin/wine fledge.exe /app=Jvm.dll /handheld=9550 /session=9550 /app-param=DisableRegistration /app-param=JvmAlxConfigFile:9550.xml /data-port=0x4d44 /data-port=0x4d4e /pin=0x2100000A
7. Fixup the 9550.xml file

1. cat 9550.xml | sed -e ‘s/^M//’ > /tmp/foo
2. mv /tmp/foo 9550.xml

OBAI

Thursday, May 13. 2010  –  Category: Musings, Songbird

I’m leaving Songbird.

It’s been a blast, and I’ve loved working here.  I think Songbird is in a great position now, what with the Philips partnership, and the upcoming partnerships that are in the pipeline waiting to be announced.  It’s hugely gratifying to be able to walk into Target, pick up a Philips MP3 player and see the Songbird logo on the back.  It is partly because of where Songbird is now that I feel comfortable leaving, knowing it’s in the capable hands of all the birders involved.  I’ll continue to follow Songbird’s progress with a fond eye and a tuned ear.

I wish the Songbird and Mozilla communities all the best, and hope that I can still be involved in both.  I think the Mozilla community is amazing, truly one of a kind, and it’s been really awesome to have the chance to work and be involved with it.

So what’s up for me next?  I’m finishing up my work on the servicepane until the end of the month, and then I’m off to go join Rdio… obviously the music bug has bit me.

new servicepane!

Thursday, May 6. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

My project for the last month or so has been implementing the new servicepane for Songbird: Our old tree-based widget was horribly inflexible for… well pretty much anything.  Our new binding uses XUL elements to build up a much better looking widget (IMHO).  We’ve now divided top level nodes into groups, collapsible by clicking on the group headers (with bonus whizzy animation to boot!).  We’ve also made badges, and an API for adding them which should allow add-ons to have nice count badges like the Concerts & New Releases add-ons do above.  The badge API will also allow you to have arbitrary image badges, which is how we implement the eject button for devices.

Perhaps the best part of the new servicepane is the fact that it’s all just XUL elements and widgets, which means you can get your node, and tweak it via JS as much as you like (within reason).  Additionally, since all the styling is just CSS, Featherers have a lot more flexibility to change the layout and style the way the servicepane looks now.

It’s in trunk now so should be in tonight’s nightly builds.

Media View Toggle Buttons

Tuesday, Feb 2. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

One of the things implemented in Purple Rain (the new Feather in Songbird 1.4) was direct toggle buttons to select the current Media View.  However, we only implemented them for the built in List View & Filter View buttons.  Third party Media Views were still only listed in the arrow-drop-down menu button next to them.  I’m happy to say that we’ve landed bug 18538 on trunk yesterday which will allow Media View developers to create and define icons to represent their Media View.  They will be automatically inserted into the row of buttons to allow users to more easily switch to the available views.

All the Media View developer needs to do is create an icon file.  It must be 22×80, with all four 22×20 states (normal, hover, active, and disabled) vertically stacked in it.  Here’s a sample one I created for John M’s excellent Grid View:

All that’s left is to point to it inside the Media View’s install.rdf file.  In the same <songbird:mediaPage> section we simply define a new <songbird:contentIcon> value, like so:

<songbird:mediaPage>
   <Description>
        <songbird:contentIcon>chrome://gridview/skin/mpIcon.png</songbird:contentIcon>
        <songbird:contentTitle>Grid View</songbird:contentTitle>
        <songbird:contentUrl>chrome://gridview/content/media-page.xul</songbird:contentUrl>
    </Description>
</songbird:mediaPage>

That’s all there is to it!

Updated locations for Concerts

Monday, Feb 1. 2010  –  Category: Songbird

I just committed an encoding fix for Songbird’s Concerts add-on that, starting with tonight’s nightlies on trunk, should mean you start seeing some updated European countries in the available locations list.  The new countries include Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.

While the concert data is now being included, not all localisations are up to date.  Notably, out of that list, we’re missing the Danish, Finnish, Dutch, and Norwegian localisations entirely.  The Swedish localisation just needs a few more strings translated.

If you’d like to help out and see the full localised Concerts add-on in all its glory, please go register with Babelzilla.org and help translate the Concerts add-on here.