Archive for December, 2009

New features in Spark

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Some new developments on the Spark (gsDroid replacement) front – see screenshots below. Specifically, the look of the app has changed to a lighter theme, and a message viewer has been added.

I’m getting a small, but considerable number of reports of logins failing for certain users.This issue is difficult to debug, as it involves people’s usernames/passwords, and I’m not quite sure how to deal with it delicately. If you’re currently experiencing an error with gsDroid and want to help troubleshoot, I’m planning on putting together a testing application to investigate the problem. You will need to run the program and provide credentials. It will write some files to the SD card, which you can then review and forward to me via email.

Because Spark will use the same authentication method as gsDroid, if gsDroid is not fixed, Spark will have the same problems. If you can help with testing, please send me an email, or post a comment here (include your email address if you do).

UPDATE: This has been fixed.

Posted in Spark, Update | No Comments »

Icons, icons everywhere

Monday, December 14th, 2009

The successor to gsDroid is coming along nicely. I’ve managed to shear off a significant amount of time in the processing phase of the data fetch by among other things, performing bulk inserts. The end result is a significant reduction in the amount of time needed to populate list of played games – from ~32 seconds down to about 16 (on a 3G connection, with a list of 60 games). This assumes that you’re fetching the list of played games for the first time – for subsequent refreshes, update time is a lot shorter (few seconds).

The other news is that icons for games, achievements, and friends have been added, as you can see in the screen captures below. Of course, they will result in longer fetch times, but they’re optional, and can be disabled.

Posted in Spark, Update | No Comments »

Adventures in Android land

Friday, December 11th, 2009

My XBox Live application for Android has been out for a while now, and while feedback has been mixed, it has been rather encouraging. If you’re interested, you can check it out by using Android’s Barcode Scanner app to snap the image to the right.

As feedback shows, a small percentage of users are understandably wary of providing their email address and password to the application, and completely refuse to use it. Most of the current applications that perform similar functions use the XBox Live proprietary API, which requires only a gamertag to obtain similar information. gsDroid, on the other hand, obtains its information by signing in to the XBox Live site and scanning it for information. The upside of this is that I can generally obtain a lot more information than the (free, but proprietary) API can provide. The downside is that it takes a lot of time to fetch this information, and process it raw. And of course, it requires a user’s full account information – the gamertag alone will not suffice.

To make things worse, shortly before releasing gsDroid, I realized that I went about the application completely wrong. gsDroid schedules itself as a service, and performs a full update every 15 minutes. This means that it must refresh the list of games, achievements and friends at each 15-minute interval. Most users need only an up-to-date friends list, and only occasionally an updated list of games; yet gsDroid’s design does not make it easy to do this. Instead of completely scrapping everything, I decided to release gsDroid as a free application.

That is why shortly after releasing the application, I started working on another version, designed from the ground up to be a lot more flexible, and not fetch information unless necessary. Work is progressing along nicely, and I’m already seeing a lot of improvement over gsDroid’s design – for one thing, the seemingly age-long initial synchronization process is completely gone, and while, say, initial fetch of your game list does take some time, it doesn’t take nearly as much time as with gsDroid. For this reason, gsDroid’s not likely to receive any newer features – most of my spare time is currently going towards the new application.

To keep up with the application’s progress, keep checking this site; I will try to post information on new features as it comes up.

Posted in News, gsDroid for XBox Live | 1 Comment »