Blog updates

Wednesday 22 June 2011

ChromeMarks update 22.06.2011

Another update to ChromeMarks. The juicy details:

  1. When a sync finishes, the last date something was received by Google is displayed back as well. This should hopefully allow you to see quickly if your Chrome browser is actually syncing - if the last date reported is two weeks ago but you know you created a new bookmark in Chrome yesterday, then Chrome is lying to you.
  2. Initial work on a "first time use" popup. Currently this just confirms the date of the last change received by Google. Will detect and add more soon, such as "have you enabled sync in Chrome?" or "you have duplicates, would you like to know how to fix Chrome to correct it?" Again, trying to step the Market comments saying my app is not working, when it's completely down to Chrome bugs!
  3. Authenticate with Google once per week instead of every sync. Should speed things up a bit. A checkbox under Advanced settings can turn this off if it causes trouble. I may be able to extend this to maybe two weeks or more? It should handle password changes, but I haven't tried to confirm it!
  4. German translation. Tons of thanks to Steven Jung for all his help.
  5. Some tweaks to the settings screens, specifically for Light themes. Someone whinged in a Market comment which prompted me to check on the status of android bug 4611. There had been a recent update from someone suggesting another way to try. Things look better now.
  6. Corrections to some translations, just a handful of Italians ones tweaked.
  7. A sprinkling of bug fixes.
  8. Big G made changes that meant I may not have been receiving bug reports for the last month. Google changed it such that Docs form submissions had to be by https where previously they could be unsecure. There had been a change to ACRA recently to ensure the submitted bug reports are https so I upgraded the single line of code. There's a newer version of ACRA that I might migrate to soon as it captures a lot more helpful info after a crash.
A screenshot of the new "this is the first time you synced, here's the last date reported by Google that they received bookmarks from your browser":

Sunday 5 June 2011

ChromeMarks Update 2011.06.05

A long overdue update to ChromeMarks. As usual, the list of the all important stuff:

  1. New app icon and artwork. Thanks to Dries Oeyen (http://nexworx.com/dries) for his work and for everyone who voted. Thanks also to the runner up Ă‰milien.
  2. Significant changes to the core of the sync engine. I've written some of it in native code (which is C). This may not bring much performance improvements, but it does allow me the potential to easy merge large chunks of the real Chrome source code into the program and benefit from reliable code and not having to rewrite it into another language. But I'm new to this and I can't guarantee there isn't a memory leak here or there or any incompatibility. I'm nervous as it's compiled for a specific architecture which allegedly should work on all current android devices - but until it's out there, I won't know for sure!
  3. A fix for users that had overriden the home folder and experienced a crash when they opened the app. This was usually due to that overriden folder being deleted later or updated later and the app not handling that well.
  4. Italian translation. Thanks to Sergio Alisi for all his work.
  5. More captures of corrupted databases. Android really does have a lot of soft spots..!
Sorry it took so long this one, but I had to learn C from scratch and it took a while to get something stable enough to prove this was a valid direction.