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I’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).

The other thing is that I’m receiving a large number of requests to add game comparisons to Spark (which is already done), auto-updates to profile status, and notifications. Spark’s freeware status allows me a large amount of flexibility with respect to which features I want to include in subsequent releases, as well as how often updates are released. Finding that I’m already spending all of my free time on the application, and that I’m working more and more towards the commonly requested features has made me wonder whether the next version of Spark should be a commercial application, with all the requested features added.

The upside to this is that it would allow me to be more goal-oriented towards what the public wants, and give me an incentive towards improving the application – the downside is that it will no longer be free. That said, it’s a safe bet that Spark will be cheaper than that other XBox Live app (you know the one), and that the current version will remain free – both in terms of cost, and in terms of advertisements.

Tags: nexus one

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 18:54 and is filed under OpenSpark, Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.