As usual, the release notes:
- I've completely rewritten the network stack. There are two common ways of performing a network request in Android - apache http client and java net. Both have pros and cons and the app had been one for certain parts of logic and the other for other things. A while back a posting on the android developer blog suggested that they had been optimising one of these with each release of android and not touching the other one anymore.
So I've made all network requests funnel through to a single place that determines the one method to use that is the most appropriate for your device (as suggested by Google on that blog). It's made the code a bit cleaner in many places as well. But just in case, I've added an override in the advanced settings that allows you to change the network stack to another one - use with caution as the app should pick the right one always and the different (i.e. not Google recommended) one may introduce other unknown errors.
Preference to allow you to override the net work implementation. Use with caution!
For users on Gingerbread and above, you may notice some performance benefits as the app is always using the more optimised version for your devices.
- Fixed a pet annoyance of mine. When creating/editing a bookmark in the full app, you could choose to fetch the icon. This did a round robin of three icon providers and picked the first that conformed to chrome's standards. Unfortunately they weren't always the prettiest icons returned by the providers - some times they were a bit washed out as the bpp had been lowered by the provider. There was also another provider out there that returned better quality icons, but wasn't in a format that Android could easily accept. I managed to find a way to accept the fourth icon provider, so now the app will allow you to see the results from all four. You can pick the one you like best and use that.
Choose the icon to use. Click "view larger" to make them larger, but remember they are only 16 pixels so larger also means blurrier.
May want a little more tweaking here as this all looks good on the emulator, but on my real phone the icons are a bit small and maybe hard to select - I think I'll need to add some scaling for device density to fix this. Also, they are requested one at a time and I'd like to try and ping off the request concurrently as if one provider takes a while to respond it holds them all up. - For the full app, you can now add a widget to your home screen that will perform an immediate sync. It doesn't look pretty, but it works. My first foray into widgets - I still want to try and see if I can get a proper bookmarks widget sometime this year (but for users on 2.3 and below, there are no scrollable widgets so this adds a large amount of extra complexity). This "sync now" widget at the moment starts a sync itself. I may change that later to broadcast an intent which the main app responds to - this would then allow users to send that same intent from any other app they like, i.e. tasker, llama, etc.
Rather boring screenshot of the new boring widget.. :-)
- Some hefty changes to the authenticator code. This is used to get tokens from Google to access your bookmarks and to authenticate/refresh them and authenticate to Chrome using those tokens. I've pulling it all out into it's own implementation. This allowed me to build an OAuth2 flavour as well. For users on non-google licensed devices (i.e. rockchip tablets, kindle fire, folio, etc), Google will not send back bookmarks to these devices if you authenticate via the android account. I'm guessing this is a large licensing block put in place. Over the last few months I've noticed some code going into Chrome to allow you to use OAuth2 to authenticate with Chrome instead. I don't know how to invoke it as the latest canary still uses the normal method of login - I'm guessing this might be there for chrome-os? Anyway, I've pinched some of the flags needed and now my app can do an OAuth2 request and retrieve your bookmarks. Now the standard Android account is still more secure, faster and most appropriate for accessing bookmarks, so please don't cut over to OAuth2 if the app already works for you. But for those who can't use the android account, this is the only decent alternative.
NOTE: I still need some playtime - I'm not sure how this works with 2-step verification - I'm sure it does work, but I don't know which password to use yet. Hopefully this shouldn't break existing users authentication...:-) - Some mild tweaks to the action bar for ICS users - before ICS the previous users with an action bar were wide tablets. Now with ICS, they might be mobile users and I noticed the action bar was getting mighty cramped and often the text wasn't all fitting in. I've tweaked this now to move the "sync" button to the main menu if there isn't enough space to display it normally.
- Another reason for the delays was that I wanted to try and get some proper testing suites up and running. Recently it's taken me longer and longer to test each release as I need to play on at least 5 different android emulators which might also further expand to include market and non-market devices depending on the changes. This takes a lot of time to keep repeating the same thing and if I make a mild tweak, I have to go back and run them all again and try to ensure I follow the same steps. So I've spent some time creating proper unit tests for some of the core functionality (simple sync tests, http tests, file export tests, etc, etc). It was a bit tricky to implement as I just couldn't get it to work in a seperate app like the documentation suggests (I had to keep adding more and more jar files to be exported and that just didn't seem right or automateable). In the end I've added them to the main app's codebase and my ant scripts that produce my builds simply hide or include that code. This also helped me fix a couple of bugs along the way in the authenticator and the main sync. Hopefully I'll add more over time.
- Some more tweaks to the backup functionality in the main app. Once again I was being stung by the android 1mb limit in a cursor, so I've split the data out and retrieve icons separately. Might mean a slightly slower export - especially if you have a lot of icons - but it should be more reliable. Also, some more fixes around the creation of the file itself whereby some errors to access the sdcard weren't being reported to the user properly.
- Also noticed at the start of December that the Lite app has been downloaded 250,000 times! Fantastic result! Also even better considering it only went on the market on November 28th 2010, so that's literally 250k in 12 months!
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