IG 88 – Android Apps

If you have received an upgrade on an HTC phone, and now only HTC Locations comes up when docked. Complain! File a support ticket somehow… probably with your carrier ( T-Mobile, Verizon, etc… ) It seems like the only way to get back pressure on them to realize they implemented that stupidly. They gutted the AOSP car mode code, and hard wired their own stuff in, so the standard events do not fire anymore.

HTC has hacked Android in their Sense roms to directly launch their subscription ‘Locations’ navigation software. This sucks…

Why didn’t they just include Locations as a possible handler of the car home intent? It would launch by default for phones that had no other car home installed, but still allow intelligent users to supplant the car home with something of their choosing.

I’ve played around with a leaked ICS / Sense rom for the HTC Sensation, and have not found a way around it.

The good news is that Senseless roms don’t have this problem, as they replace the HTC modified frameworks with the AOSP bits.

This just furthers my belief that if it isn’t AOSP it isn’t Android. Everything else is not the Android I want to develop for.

I’ve posted a series of incremental bug fixes over the last week.
This addresses issues with extreme cropping proportions for the wallpaper,
Out Of Memory issues due to caching the styled icons,
Fixed a few things in the Contacts and Starred Contacts, they are now sorted by name then number.
Added a direct dial shortcut creator to help those without the stock android feature.
Fixed missing images in the dialpad, this caused it to be impossible to read.

Now you can turn off the synchronization with the system volume. I also lowered the polling rate for the synchronization, so it would be less costly.
Regardless, back in version 1.2, I fixed the alarm that is used to poll the volume level so that ihe alarm should not wake the cpu… ignored if asleep.

But, I seemed to have screwed up deployment of version 1.2… hopefully this fixes it by flushing version 1.3 out there…

3.28 introduced wallpaper and two bugs that prevented most people from seeing it. 3.29 fixes those.

I’ve taken it out of beta. I believe I’ve fixed the issues with any of the crash reports I’ve seen. It should now be tolerant of picking random files that are not images when customizing icons.

On launch, if another app is set as the default car home, it will display that app name, and provide a button to get you as far as Android will let me toward clearing the defaults for that app.. you have to find the app, and click the clear defaults, the OS won’t let an app do that for you.

A few other little tweaks. I also changed the app icon, to help differentiate from my Car Dock v2 app.

Hit the market for all the fun…

I am getting automated crash reports in what I think is users trying to add certain widgets to their car dock home screens. If anyone can report to me what widgets are failing, I would appreciate it!

I’ve put the car mode back in the launcher. I think I have it right this time… fixed a few other crashes that have been reported through the automated crash reporting system. Available in the market, and on the app page.

You all are finding great bugs for me! Thanks, I really appreciate the opportunity to make this solid on the variety of phones beyond my own.

Beta 9 is in the market, and on the app page. Fixes icon labeling and stops the database erasing on upgrade.

I put beta 5 in the market, and received a crash report just a few minutes later. Looks like a Samsung requires permissions to set the WiFi state, that my CM6 Nexus One doesn’t. So, beta 6 adds lots of permissions that am, or intend to use.