Posts Tagged ‘nexus one’

On the delay, the freeware status of Spark

Monday, April 5th, 2010

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).

(more…)

Spark news; update on the Android Market Seeding Program

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

As mentioned earlier, Spark is near release – at this point, it’s mostly being tested, with the odd piece of code thrown here and there. What’s coming:

  • Compare games/achievements with friends
  • View own and friend avatars
  • Send messages in the background
  • Slightly lighter theme

I’ve also received the promised Nexus One phone from the Android Market Seeding program – the one I originally mistook as a scam. The device is real, and should go a ways in helping me ensure better compatibility with Android devices – thanks Google!

(more…)

Android Market Seeding program

Friday, March 5th, 2010

A couple of days ago, I and a number of other Android developers received an email claiming to be from one of Google’s programmers. The message is posted here in its entirety, and basically thanks the developer for writing Android apps, and offers a free Nexus One or Droid phone as a “thank you” for having an app on Market that fits a specific set of criteria.

Having seen all sorts of scams in the last 15 years, and judging by the content of the message as well as the form, I was immediately skeptical. But a large number of sources (here are a few) claimed that the message is legitimate, so after several hours of consideration, I went ahead and applied for the program. I’ll post more if I actually receive the device.

Well played, Google. You just made it very difficult for me to use any other phone (not that I wasn’t sold on the platform already).

UPDATE: Today I received an official confirmation that the information was received and confirmed.