• The problem is intermittent and therefore difficult to determine the root cause
• the problem does not appear to be specific to a handset
• the problem does not appear to be specific to a version of Android

I appreciate your patience while I fix this issue and I’ll have the app up and running again ASAP!!! In the mean time, keep sending through your crash reports. Every report I get brings me closer to debugging the issue!

Cheers

As well as the desk I need to make sure I accurately represent the components that I essentially will be building this desk to suit!

My Tascam DM-24 mixer is one of my favourite pieces of equipment. I managed to pick it up second hand from World of Music in Brighton after they cleaned out a studio in Ballarat back in 2006. She’s not all that flash in modern day terms but she’ll still do 16 channels at 96khz! Combined with my Motu-2048 it’s a small studio powerhouse.

This model’s not perfect (I could definitely have spent more time on it!) but the dimensions are right so it suits it’s purpose.

Rather than just jumping into the fog I’ve decided that it is smart to think carefully about exactly what it is I’m attempting to fit into and onto this desk, starting with me!

I got KY to grab the measuring tape and after carefully adjusting my chair to where it felt comfortable and my posture appeared to be good, she measured what I believe to be a few key indicators that will help me design a better desk.

1. Height from the floor to my eye line (for optimal monitor positioning)
2. Height from the floor to the face down palms of my hands (for helping to determine the desk height)
3. Height from the floor to the tops of my knees (for helping to determine the desk height)
4. Depth from my elbows to the tips of my fingers (for helping to determine the desk depth)
5. Width of my shoulders (for helping to determine the desk width)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (more out of laziness than anything else!) but what better reason to get back into the swing than my new Studio desk project.

The objective is to re-work the old cramped corner desk situation into a state of the art desk that is good for music production, gaming and of course work. I’m heading toward a 3-screened design with a KVM Switch for the work laptop and enough room for my Tascam DM24 mixer and Yamaha keyboard.

My initial designs in Sketch-up are coming along! I’m hoping to do this project in 6 months for under 3k (including new parts for the PC).

I’m basically planning to design what I need using real world dimensions, then get the wood professionally cut to specification. I’ll then put it all together and perform the finishing touches myself.

Be sure to download the Version 2.4 here or at the Android Market; which as of right now (2012-06-25 @8pm AEST) is working fine.

The fundamental change has come in the “On Air” feed, which caused me so many headaches right back at the start of this project. The “On Air” XML feed delivers information about the presenter, the program name and some other cool stuff like images of the presenter and colours that relate to their program’s style guide.

Back when Triple J contacted me and asked me to remove any official logo or image that was the property of Triple J and the ABC (this included images of their presenters that were simply linked to their website) I left the only interesting thing I could, which was the colour. After all, you can’t copyright a colour!

Now it seems that they’ve taken out the colour information from the feed (which has been the root cause of many crashes this week). So we’re back to a static… never changing… boring and somewhat hideous saturation of Triple J red. That said, I can’t tell what their doing to their feeds right now so it may return, in some form or another, in the next few days or weeks.

The devs at the ABC certainly haven’t got everything under control, because I’m looking at their website now (in the “listen live” popup window) and it’s showing me “The Doctor” and I’m listening to Linda on “Good Nights”. Hell, I’m betting that the feed changes will likely BREAK the app again sometime in the near future. Who knows! But in the mean time, I’ll continue to release temporary versions as I detect areas that their changes break the app.

Thanks for all your great feedback, ratings and patience.

Just this week I have discovered yet another long realised yet under touted feature that exists in the Chrome browser: Bookmark Synchronisation between devices.

It has me almost as excited as I was all those years ago when I first realised that the contacts on my shiny new Android phone automatically synchronised with my GMail account!

Using your Google credentials, you can “sign in” to Chrome. Signing in allows chrome to store some of your local data and settings directly into your Google account. Signing into any other instance of Chrome on any other device immediately transforms your otherwise stock browser experience into your warm cosy familiar and efficient workspace. Check out the marketing video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Upon first sign in, Chrome immediately takes you to the Personal Stuff page of the Chrome settings menu where you can customise which components of the Chrome experience you want to synchronise to your Google account. You can synchronise any of the following:

• Remembered Passwords
• Autofill Form Data
• Browsing History (Bookmarks / Cookies etc…)
• Themes

The reason why I like this so much is because bookmarks seemed to be the final frontier for synchronisation. So long have we all enjoyed centralised email systems (like Hotmail or Gmail) and centralised file storage (like DropBox), coupled with the ever growing number of SaaS based online applications (like Microsoft Office 365) giving us the ability to make our workspace independent from the physical device that we use. But for me, my bookmarks have always been detached from this joyful feeling of cubicle freedom.

Couple this simple concept and functionality with the naturally intuitive drag and drop behaviour of the Chrome UI, and managing your bookmarks is a breeze. (It’s also instantaneous!). I highly recommend giving it a try today.

If you find yourself stuck trying to replicate something that you’ve seen in another application or game, there’s a high chance that someone else has already hit that road block, solved it and is now offering their solution freely. Don’t be afraid so sacrifice control of the architecture to achieve a quality game.

Which brings me to my brief article on the open source Android game development library: AndEngine.

When choosing a framework to accelerate development, there are many factors that need careful consideration. Some of these include:

• Ease of implementation - Is the framework east to install, maintain and extend for your own purposes?
• Ongoing Framework Support - How long are the developers going to keep maintaining and improving the framework?
• Portability - Will the code you write port onto another platform easily or will you need to re-write a large chunk or the whole code for another device?
• Performance - How efficient is the library or framework and is it trying to do too much?
• Size - How much extra code is being delivered to memory limited devices with your package?

After carefully evaluating several frameworks using the logic above, I’ve recently landed on the AndEngine game development framework. AndEngine is designed solely for Android development and extends most of the basic Android classes that most developers already find familiar. So writing Android applications that Leverage OpenGL ES 2.0 is easy thanks to the simple implementation of call backs and loopers that control typical game features like animation and actor instantiation.

The choice to use AndEngine was a tough one, given that it has its own set of drawbacks and limitations and there are so many other alternatives out there. LibGDX is another game development framework that peaked my interest due to its claim to performance and its ability to execute code both on the desktop and on the Android platform. However after a few days of testing my commercial reality set in and I wasn’t convinced that my application required the low level control of OpenGL that LibGDX provided. Furthermore, LibGDX is more of an application framework rather than a game library. So there would be a lot of work to get some of the basic game principles up and running. If LibGDX ported easily to other platforms like the iPhone then there would be no competition, but like most frameworks the platforms are just too different. So I’ll just keep my game logic outside of the device dependant libraries and if I hit a winner on the Android platform I’ll outsource a port! After all, life doesn’t afford much spare time for doing everything yourself!

Now, if I could only get the OpenGL camera to resize and recalculate the scene perspective ratio when I change the screen orientation…

The other major change comes from something I learned when I worked with a Triple J listener from Darwin (Thanks Paul) to resolve some of the Northern Territory time zone issues. It turns out that even the official Triple J iPhone application was not working properly for N.T. users and after bringing this to the ABCs attention they were kind enough to provide me with a deeper understanding of their XML feeds.

This lead to the alteration of the Track History system. Originally, the track history relied on your device retrieving information about every song played and storing that information in a database for future retrieval. But with my new found understanding of the ABC XML feeds I discovered that there is a feed that delivers the last 20 songs played. So in the spirit of reducing the impact on data usage, memory consumption and battery life I have switched the track history to use that feed instead of compiling a running track history.

So all in all you should see very few changes cosmetically but the app will draw less from your device and perform better in the long run.

I’d also like to shout out a special Thank you to Narco (Elliott) for his donation. Much appreciated Narco!

The new version of the app brings the much anticipated Widget to the scene. The widget has a few touch sensitive areas:

• Touching the Logo will launch the app
• Touching the Now Playing information will force a refresh
• Touching the Star will add or remove the track to your list of favourites

The app now keeps a track history so you can look back at what’s played. The inherent nature of the widget and track history required a change to most of the architecture below the app and I had to overcome several challenges akin to balancing functionality with battery and data usage.

I plan to publish several articles early next month on the approaches I took to solving some of the problems that I encountered while building this app. I’m still not entirely satisfied that all of the bugs are ironed out, so I’ may have a few minor patch releases coming out soon. There are some situations that just require the app to be working for several hours / days at a time before hidden bugs rear their ugly head. The Google developer console is brilliant for using the public to locate these bugs.

Another major achievement of this app was to automatically determine the time zone of the device, and from that, pick the appropriate XML feed. The old version of the app used to allow the user to choose their specific feed. I believe this caused confusion, so I have simplified the configuration to simply allow the user to select between “Listening to the Radio” and “Streaming Online”.

So far the feedback has been great! Still over 4 stars with 60+ ratings. If you have any suggestions or bug reports please don’t hesitate to email me at djpoida AT gmail DOT com.