I’ve spent most of the last weekend working on Sylence, and I’ve made a significant amount of progress. After doing some reading, I see no reason to use the Android 3.0/4.0 fragments tech in Sylence, and while I’m debating the idea of developing an application widget, I have definitely made some positive changes.

First and foremost, the biggest change so far is that in the dialog to create a new silence alarm, the date and time pickers aren’t initially visible. You will see the current date and time, and a date and time 45 minutes later. Tap the date, and you will be presented with the date picker. Similarly, when you tap the time, you will be presented with the time picker. I think this looks and works better than the old system, though it may be a little less obvious.

Also, the horizontal scrolling is gone in that dialog; the day of the week options for recurring alarms are now stacked vertically when recurring is selected, so when editing an alarm, you can immediately see which days are selected and which are not.

The next major change, although completely invisible, is the way that Sylence does the important work of checking to see if the phone should be silenced or not. Until now, a service has been running full time, sleeping for roughly one minute then waking up and doing a check before going back to sleep. As of the new version, the app will use Android’s AlarmManager to do this, which may save more power than the old way. (Note that the old way didn’t use very much power, but this way should use even less.) The caveat, however, is that in order to do its work properly and timely, the AlarmManager needs to obtain a partial wake lock to wake up the processor long enough to do its work; otherwise, the alarms won’t be triggered until the device is woken up by another program or by user actions. In order to obtain a partial wake lock, I had to add another new permission, WAKE_LOCK, to the list of permissions used by Sylence. Without it, I’d either have to go back to the old method or Sylence would only operate on its schedule while the phone was in use.

Another down side is that I’m adding more advertising to Sylence. I’m considering adding a “Pro” version back into the Android Market without the advertising, but I haven’t decided at this time.

I still haven’t gotten much in the way of feedback on Sylence at all, so I’m just doing things as I see fit, No ratings in the Market, no comments, no bug reports, no feedback. If you don’t like how Sylence is progressing, let me know. It’s the only way I can improve it, and right now is the best time to do that. There are still some changes I want to make before I release this new version, but if you want something in it, now’s the time to let me know!

Update 12/29/2011 2:59 am: Sylence 1.5 has been uploaded to the Android Market with new screenshots.

Over the last week, despite my other obligations, I’ve been a bit busy with my published Android applications. Among other things, I fixed a few annoying bugs in Sylence culminating in a series of releases last week, and today I published the long awaited update to Gas Up.
I am disappointed in this release, beta 5, of Gas Up however.  A feature I spent a fair amount of time figuring out seems to be working on only one of my three Android devices. That feature is the ability to double tap on the map and enter a gas price/station at that location. It works properly on my G1 running Android 1.6, but is missing from my Huawei Ascend (Android 2.1) and Nexus One (Android 2.3.3). I’m not going to dig around and fix this issue at this point; instead I’m going to do a complete rewrite of Gas Up because I have learned a significant amount about Android since I started development on Gas Up nearly a year ago. I’m sure it will be quite some time before I complete the next iteration, but I’m even more sure it will be better than ever.

Just a short while ago, I posted beta release 2, quickly followed by 3, of Gas Up. Beta 2 features a few important, if relatively insignificant issues:

  • Tapping an overlay icon no longer produces multiple copies of the same dialog window.
  • And $0.00 gas prices can no longer be submitted to the server.

There were a number of other changes that should improve overall performance significantly as well. Gas Up will now automatically check the server every 30 seconds for new data in the map viewable area. Right now, this is excessive considering the small user base, but as user and data entry numbers increase, this should provide fairly up to date information.

I also got a complaint that Gas Up crashed an EVO phone during the submission process. While I didn’t spot anything in particular that would cause a complete meltdown, I have made a few changes in that area, and will be keeping a close eye on it. Please report any similar occurances!

All of that applied to beta 2. Beta 2 also featured a crash when exiting the app, which I quickly fixed and released beta 3. Or so I hope. If you see a crash on backing out of Gas Up, please either send me feedback via Android Market or file a bug at http://bugsy.badlucksoft.com .

This is just a quick status update on Gas Up…

The basic application concept is nearing completion, and I’ve managed to get server data to the app and properly processed once there. I’ve still got a lot of server-app communication code to work out and implement, but everything is going pretty smoothly. The biggest headache I’ve had so far was getting a spinner (drop down menu) control to get data from a content provider (database access point more or less) and display it properly. With the exception of one line of code, my code was correct. The problem was that I was under the impression that the spinner needed me to provide a text view which it would use to write data; it turns out it already has one, and I had to specify it in just the right place… Needless to say, that wasted about two days of my development time…

Nonetheless, I’ll post a pair of screen shots here later.

Oh, and I’m having trouble finding people to test the application and be early adopters… Maybe it’s just that I’m not drawing much attention to this site (as in none at the moment), or perhaps it’s that I’m not using the proper marketing methods. I’d hate for this app to get uploaded to the Android Market with absolutely no data but that little amount I can put in myself… The comments and ratings will be brutal, but ultimately I don’t really care about those right now. Once the app is live, and people are hopefully entering data on a regular basis, then I’ll care.

Screen shots as promised. The first is a screen shot from my Nexus One. It’s showing an overlay icon somewhere over Mexico, but that’s beside the point. Th

e screen shot is merely to give an idea of what to expect… 🙂 With this screen shot, you see two of the three tabs that are present in the application; the third one, Donate, is currently disabled despite being complete. (There’s just no point in having the donations system enabled when the application has no data and no users.)

The application starts up on the Stations tab and theoretically will display gas stations within the viewing range of the map. Scroll the map around or zoom in and out, and the results will change. Eventually.

The second tab, Submit Price, is shown in this screen shot from the emulator. (I don’t have that screenshot app on my phone, yet, and I didn’t want to take a screen shot that would include my home address, so I used the emulator and the longitude & latitude of a gas station known to me.) This tab includes everything you need to submit a gas price back to the system. ALWAYS SUBMIT THE PRICE WHILE YOU ARE AT THE GAS STATION! Note the address listed for “Associated Address”. This is submitted to the server as the recorded location of the gas station being entered. Unless you want to share your address with everyone, submit at the gas station! (Admittedly, no one will know it’s your particular address, but I won’t be held responsible for angry and confused gas seekers showing up at your house in the middle of the night.)