Blog updates

Tuesday 6 December 2011

ChromeMarks updated - 2011.12.06

Another ChromeMarks update.

The major change is the addition of synced Search Engines:

If you enable these for syncing in Chrome, they will now be available in the app and you can click on them and use them as quick search for the website in question.

In a later release, I'll try and add them to the Android Search Widget so you can do a similar thing to the chrome omni-box and hopefully the chosen search engine will be an option in the results list along with matching bookmarks/folders.

NOTE: The search engines will only be downloaded from a fresh sync - if you already have bookmarks downloaded, you need to reset the app. This is because it's a bit tricky to download search engines from the beginning and merge them with other existing data. Chromesync returns lots of excess data when you sync something from the start and I don't want to write a huge amount of extra reconciling.

Wherever the app used to show bookmarks or folders, it was in a statement that said "IF bookmark then do this else assume folder and do this". That wouldn't work now with a third option - search engines. Also, I didn't want to contaminate the Lite app with mentions of the search engine in code as that increases my testing efforts. So I've had to do another major rewrite to put this sort of logic into a handler for each type of "thing" the app will show. This gives future benefits as now it would be easier to (i.e.) add Passwords or Synced tabs, etc. This means that potentially only click or long click on any item might function differently to before - please let me know if anything is different!

Some other bugs squashed:

  1. The last release included some severe changes to the handlers to separate some of the historic intermingling of ui, database and code. One impact of this is that at the end of a sync, the controlling code stops the processing thread. Unfortunately, there may still be some messages in the queue that haven't been processed yet. This wasn't an issue before as everything was one long chunk of code so ran in the correct order. But now, some of the final messages appear to be missed on occasion. If you have a fast phone, this means the controller finishes very quickly and the message to prompt for the credentials isn't being received in time. So some fixes to force the controller to wait for all the messages to be processed before the controller ends.
  2. The new backups feature has a couple of reported bugs. They all stem from the android 1mb limit. I've made some tweaks which should improve it and allow the backup to retrieve > 1mb of data.
  3. As request by one of my regular users, I've changed the format of the filename for the backups to something closer to CCYY_MM_DD_HH_MM_SS

Still lots on the agenda for future releases:

  • Better search widget integration with search engines
  • Scheduler for backups.
  • Honeycomb integration
  • More data types for syncing - passwords?
  • More ui polish - split screen for tablets?
That's it for now - enjoy!