A while ago I taught my roommate how to make Android apps. He made one to help you keep track of how much gas you have left, if your car’s gas gauge is broken (his is). He hates user interface design, and kept telling me he’d make an update with a nice UI later on. He’s home for the weekend right now, and I was bored, so I designed one for him in Photoshop.
The shot on the left is what his app currently looks like. The shot on the right is the mockup I made. What do you think?
Also, obligatory download link to his app, maybe someday he’ll update it to look like my screenshot, but we’ll have to see how he likes it first.
Bluetooth Buffering Part 2
Well, I was thread sleeping a little too judiciously. My boss was not pleased with how slow data uploading was now. He helped me work out a solution that sleeps if it detects a missing datapoint, and runs full speed otherwise, and now I can upload 1000 datapoints from the PINPoint in 5 seconds, instead of 5 minutes.
And I have a working progress bar. So that’s awesome too!
Bluetooth Buffering
First, a little background. In the lab I work in, we have a little board called the PINPoint that is covered in sensors, and records the values of these sensors as datapoints. I’m working on an Android app for use at a school called Science of Rivers. It’s supposed to connect a phone or tablet to the PINPoint with Bluetooth, and pull the datapoints off of it, and then display some statistical data about one of the sensors.
Anyway, so I was working on the Science of Rivers app, and I was showing it off to my boss. He randomly suggested that we test it with somewhere on the order of 1000 datapoints instead of 10, even though the students at the school probably wouldn’t be using it that way. I agreed, and someone else in the lab tweaked my PINPoint to record 100s of datapoints a second.
It didn’t work.
Looking in the logcat, after a certain point in the data, which varied, every byte that the phone read would be a 0. After poking around I found that my readByte code that I wrote a few months ago returns 0 if the buffer is empty. As I receive bytes from the PINPoint I put them in this buffer until they’re ready to be read. So it turned out that I was reading bytes off the phone faster than the PINPoint could put them there.
A little strategic use of Thread sleeping has improved the reliability dramatically, it just takes a little longer to get data now. That’s why I’m implementing a progress bar, rather than just a spinning “Please Wait” like I had. And that’s my story!
So, this “Please Wait” hourglass dealy is supposed to show up while WiFi is being enabled or disabled. It’s only showing up on my phone during disabling, nothing happens when it’s enabling. The worst part is that it works perfectly fine on my tablet and my roommate’s phone
79 sales to go until Clean Widgets breaks into the “500-1000” category!
Oh, you thought I had abandoned Torpedo? Me too! But I had an urge to work on it today and I got animated GIFs in text posts working, and photosets working! (unfortunately, no animated GIFs in photosets).
Clean Widgets updated! Version 2.0 brings new color choices for all the widgets in the collection! Now your toggles and battery meters can be green, cyan, pink, or yellow (I’m personally partial to the cyan). Get it while it’s hot!
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nickavv.cleanwidgets
Clean Widgets in glorious technicolor! Yes, it is happening.
Updated Clean Widgets
Version 1.96, a minor update fixing a bug with the brightness toggle widget.
If you had set one (or more) of the custom brightness levels to be 0, when you toggled to that setting the screen would shut off. Now selecting brightnesses of 0 for each of the 3 sliders will, behind the scenes, result in values of 10, 11, and 12 (out of 255)
How faithfully can I recreate my mockup (see previous post) in Android XML layouting? Pretty well, it turns out. Redesign is pretty far along, got almost everything working!
