5 days of development; 12. – 16. of march!

Update: Day 5, 16. march:

The browser is done, and so is Remoteless for Android beta! YAY! Did not expect to finish it in 5 days, but we did and we are extremely happy to have arrived at this remoteless milestone.

Now remember, this is the first beta, and when we got version 1.0 of the ground, we will continue to add stuff and improve it. The android version does not have any web integration, and our planned premium integration on the iOS version is not possible in java. Hopefully signup for beta will start today, and hopefully we will send our little app to google play next week. My conclusion on android development is as follows: Sometimes Android is great, and sometimes android sucks. The java language and the development tools are great. The Activity architecture is also a great enforcer of model view controller, and the web is filled with examples and tutorials. What sucks with Android is the different screen sizes. Remoteless for Android is developed on a 240 x 320 screen, and I’m sure it will look really bad on a tablet or anything big. I simply don’t know how it will turn out, and I guess a lot of future development will be to improve for bigger screens. I’m sure I will port all of my future apps to android, no doubt about it.

Update: Day 4, 15. march:

Day 4 was a little slow. At 11.10 our old couch was picked up by the buyer, and at 11.40 our new couch arrived. A nice upgrade to our living room / office, but not a productivity booster. To the left is my todo-list / bug-list which you can see is almost completed. The numbers written around on the page indicates prioritisations done while checking those boxes. The second screen shows that I finally managed to load those playlists! Java (which is the development language for android) is great since you don’t need to think that much about memory, and because of this you get elegant code. My message pipeline is pretty nice and works well for small status messages. However when i tried to pump 4-5 megabytes of play lists trough it, the java garbage collector killed the load performance. Elegant code is often slow code, and I miss some byte array operators I have in c++ / Objective-C. After some optimizations the pipeline can now handle that load without any problem, but I probably have to do some more work in speeding up this process. The code will hopefully fly on devices with a little more RAM, my test device is the cheapest android I could find. With that problem out of the way, the browser is getting better, and I will hopefully have both playlists and search done tomorrow. Remoteless for Android is so complete now that a release is near, even if i have to spend some time next week finishing it. We really hope you will like it!

Update: Day 3, 14. march:

9 screens from todays work. A lot of small stuff have been fixed today, like crashers and smooth handling of lost connection. The Menu overlay is also working now, with songslider, sharing, shuffle and repeat. Whats left for tomorrow is the Manual Connection screen, and the browser with playlists and search. The remote is really stable now, so we are pretty happy. Looking forward to get the beta out!

Update: Day 2, 13. march:

We managed to connect to the helper! Great! Adding state and button controls was easy after that. Finally we did cover art which was pretty easy due to included jpeg libraries. Tomorrow I will add playlists and search + fix some small issues related to switching orientations and lost connections. Progress is way above expectations, and the beta will probably be finished this Friday. I will try to add the menu with sharing + shuffle / repeat / time slider on Thursday, and then add the Web stuff on Friday. Hopefully full beta testing can start next week, and then we should have release in a couple of weeks (with a big ‘IF everything goes smoothly’).

Day 1, 12. march:

Basic gui pluss helper detection is now done. Hoping to establish a full connection with the helper tomorrow. Really fun to start from scratch, and hopefully we will have a fully working version by the end of this week.