ChromeMarks update 2011.07.22

Hi all - time for another update to ChromeMarks. Thankfully the changes made on the 12th July haven't had any issues that required a fix here, so these are all new features or fixes to things that have been broken for a while.

1. New features - Gestures. Only in the paid app. You can now specify that flicking up or down performs some action (i.e. up a folder, goto root) and swiping a bookmark or folder left/right will perform something else (i.e. open in new window, edit, delete). You can configure the "zone" that detects flings so it doesn't disrupt with your normal scrolling (i.e flings only work on the left half, right half, middle half, etc) and also configure the detection speed. I'm not too sure with the detection speed - it may be oversensitive, it's hard to tell as it also depends on the screen size and possibly the cpu speed. Some screenshots below.
2. New translations. Swedish, Dutch and Japanese. Thanks to all the translators who have helped (in no particular order) Kees Huiberts (nl), Gerben Markvoort (nl), Kjell Kernen (sv), Yutaka Takeda (ja), aozora (ja), Kazuo Ugai (ja).
3. It's clear from the automated bug reports there are many problems with the manufacturer builds of 3.0.1. There are many posts on the android developer forums where errors have been reported and the stock answer is "how can that possibly happen?" For whatever reason, some of the core java code is corrupted and invokes something else which will always be wrong. I don't know how it can happen, but it clearly is and many apps are affected by things that should *never* fail, but do! I've tried a few fixes here to deliberately avoid running the bits of code that knowingly fail on 3.0.1.
4. Note, the above fix is different to the other issues with Honeycomb generally regarding restarting the app keeps force closing it. That's due to changes Google forced on us with Honeycomb and neglected to make it backwards compatible with existing apps. Grrr. Hopefully a fix in a later release, but it will need a serious rewrite.
5. Some tweaks to the settings screens to dynamically resize the text for each setting's title. Hopefully you won't see text disappearing under a checkbox or drop down widget. Unfortunately I can't do this everywhere else, so popups and other text fields are still fixed sizes.
6. Changed the "Frequently asked questions" to "Help". The content is no longer hard coded answers. I've given a list of the most popular questions and linked them back to the community website. This allows me to provide more in depth answers, where needed, but to also be able to update them real-time. Also allows users to comment on them and get responses to those comments. Unfortunately this does mean the actual answers are no longer translated - though userecho (the website the community site is hosted with) says it will bring that functionality in at a later date.
7. If your first sync failed, you might have ended up with duplicate data on one of the tables in the database for each successive failed sync until it finally worked. It wasn't actually a big problem, but it might have simply made the database a smidge bigger and slower to access. Only talking a couple of extra records - if you had 1000 bookmarks, this would have had a negligible effect. On upgrade, the app will detect this and remove the extra records.

Note, there may have been some other changes that either Google started making from 12th July, or took effect due to me upgrading to the latest version of chrome sync service:

1. Some Chinese users were constantly getting ssl handshake errors. The analytics confirmed these errors were coming out for previous versions of the app as well, so it wasn't related to the last upgrade. It looks like an internet server somewhere in China that passes the traffic through to Google was mis-configured. After exactly a week, the reports started dropping fast. Thanks to Leo for sending me debug logs and for testing every few days and confirming things were working. Good job to, I wouldn't know where to complain about it!
2. Some users have started receiving "throttled" errors in the app when they change bookmarks or make new ones. Google normally throttles users to 100 changes a day. But previously it had always been a specific client software that was throttled (i.e. your desktop browser was throttled, but you could happily make 100 changes in ChromeMarks). The comments from some users might indicate that Google has changed this to throttling per user account - so irrespective of the client software, *you* can only make 100 changes a day. I've tried to get more info from Google, but don't hold your breath. Remember that auto-fill entries also count to your 100-a-day, so if you fill in a lot of form fields and have auto-fill synced, you'll hit your limit fast. More updates if I find out more info.

Some screenshots of the updated main settings screen and the Gestures screen showing some of the options (more off the bottom of the screen):

A reminder that I'm now on twitter as @chromemarks. Follow me if you want to hear about new features or Google outages and feel free to ask questions or comments.