Blog updates

Saturday 14 July 2012

ChromeMarks 2012.07.14

A new update to ChromeMarks today.

Firstly - apologies for the delay since the last update. The normal day job, the usual PC problems and no internet for a month all contributed to it. But I've been tinkering away as normal and the updates are coming!

The juicy details:

  1. A bug fix for Jelly Bean users of the Full app. Turns out that Google made undocumented changes to the SSL implementation with Jelly Bean which was causing a crash when verifying the digital signature sent back by Google. There are other apps on the Market that are experiencing similar issues with the SSL classes. Once I've got this release out, I'll file an Android bug report as it's clearly a regression from Big G.
  2. A New feature for the Full App. You can now choose to backup your Chrome bookmarks before and/or after each sync. The backups are stored on your SD card and you can specify the maximum amount of backup files to keep at any one time. If you accidentally delete some bookmarks from Chrome, you can roll back and import one of the backups into Chrome to resurrect them.
  3. For the Full app, a bit better compatibility with some apps that "share" more than just a url (i.e. Flipboard).
  4. The Folder picker seems to have some issues on 4.0.x devices. There are no problems on 2.x, 3.x or 4.1 - just 4.0.x. Which makes me think this must be another Google regression they fixed for JB. However, as soon as I simply recompiled the app, the folder picker started working on my personal 4.0.3 device. wtf? Anyway, I'm gonna rewrite it soon to a simpler type of widget which hopefully won't have the same issues as a WebView with embedded javascript. But Android doesn't have any existing widget that does this kind of functionality, so it'll be completely bespoke.
  5. For the Full app, there were some issues with the Local syncing function - for most errors, it simply stopped syncing and didn't report a problem. I've made it start to return error messages now so if you get errors where you didn't previously, then it wasn't working properly anyway! A couple of fixes along the way - some new validation from Google was causing problems if you were a 2.x user using the "copy bookmarks to a new folder in chrome" function. And some improvements to the 3.x and 4.x integration.
  6. The long press context menu was a bit lopp-sided. If you long pressed on a bookmark and then changed folder and then long clicked on a folder, you'd get the same list of options you got for a bookmark (and vice versa). Fixed that.
  7. The "Mobile bookmarks" or "Synced bookmarks" folder now appears at the root level. Note, if you already have data in the app then you'll need to reset or uninstall/reinstall for the change to take effect.
  8. And many, many, many more bugs fixed along the way..!

So what's next..?

Well, I'd like to investigate getting synced tabs to appear in the app. And a way to "hide" the search engines folder. And allegedly, Dolphin now have an sdk that allows other apps to integrate with it - so maybe a play there.