Reception for version 1.1 of Spark has been overwhelmingly positive – thanks to all of you who left positive reviews on Android Market. My 360 decided to thank me for my efforts by finally RROD‘ing, so while I wait “two to three” of the longest weeks for my console to be repaired, I don’t have much of a choice but to continue working on Spark. To whet your interest, here are some previews of what may be coming in the next release.
Archive for April, 2010
Spark version 1.1 released
Sunday, April 11th, 2010New version includes:
- Avatars
- Game and achievement comparisons
- Background tasks – friend management and message sending can now be done in the background
- Improved high-resolution device support. Spark should look much better on Nexus One and Motorola Droid
- A lot of small fixes
- New icon
Note that this version does not fix the message sending bug I mentioned in an earlier post – I still need help to track down the issue.
Help needed from those who can’t send messages from Spark
Sunday, April 11th, 2010I have received two reports so far of Spark displaying errors when sending messages. Not having experienced this error myself, and having gone over the code without finding any obvious problems, I need some help from those of you who are experiencing this error, and are handy with the devkit.
I have compiled a special ‘debugging’ version of Spark that generates more output than usual – please run it, and send me any pertinent output that it generates – I need anything that begins with ‘D/Spark’. Detailed instructions:
On the delay, the freeware status of Spark
Monday, April 5th, 2010I’ve found a fairly serious issue with scrolling on the Nexus One that’s forcing me to reconsider several things. First, it looks like scrolling works differently on the phone (at the moment I’m not sure if it’s the phone itself, or the firmware) – the ListView is not receiving the IDLE event if the user stops scrolling with his/her finger. End result of this is that if you stop scrolling with your finger (as opposed to waiting until scrolling stops automatically), Spark will not load un-cached icons. The (elegant) solution to this appears to be more complicated than one would hope – after some testing, I’ve decided to completely change how icons are loaded, which is going to take a considerable amount of time (a large number of activities use scrolling lists).
On the plus side, having the phone has allowed me to fix a lot of the issues that Droid and Nexus One users have been reporting for a while now – namely the ‘star’ corruption on the profiles, and the lack of high-resolution icons. The next version of Spark is optimized for medium- and high-resolution screens – the only drawback to this is that it is no longer likely to work on firmware 1.5 – it will require 1.6 or higher (this should be a non-issue for most users).
I'm a programmer with too much interest in programming, and not enough time.