Time to Move On...

Well, two months (and a little less than 6000 downloads!) later, its time for a new release.  

Actually, its time for two releases, but the first one (b10) was fatally broken due to a mis-handling of preferences when preferences didn't exist.  Silly Brendan, testing is for kids...

Well at least I found it before I advertised the new release.  I don't think anyone actually downloaded the broken files (sorry if you did...).

Anyway, DroidDraw-r1b11 is now available (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Platform Independent .jar)  The higlights include:

• New support for saved preferences (for now: snap-to-grid, default screen size, default root layout)
• Removed redundant XML namespace declarations
• Added support for drawing the ScrollView scroll bar
• Fixed my support for opening URLs from inside DroidDraw (previously all URLs went to my PayPal donations page [oops, how did that happen ;-)]
• DroidDraw now checks for updated versions on startup
• It now handles the layout_margin* family of xml attributes.
• A bug in the Color selector button/property has been fixed.

As always, please post any new bugs that you may find or features that you'd like to see (I'm running out of things to do!) to the issue tracker.

And if you're feeling generous, feel free to donate!

Appearance is everything...

Well, there's a new release of DroidDraw (r1b9) up on droiddraw.org.  I'm not doing a full executable release, but as always, the .jar file is a double-clickable application on most platforms (albeit without the fancy icon...)

The primary thing fixed in this release is that the labels for the various layouts in the layouts tab are now darker.  A number of people have written to me, wondering why the layouts were "disabled" in r1b8.  They're not actually disabled, they just *look* like they are.    It goes to show that my next door neighbor the HCI expert actually knows what he's talking about.   So I apologize for any confusion.  The labels are now much darker and un-disabled looking.  So hopefully that clears up any confusion.

Also added, in the desktop version of DroidDraw, is the ability to browse for images for ImageButtons and ImageViews.    This requires that you specify a location for your drawables directory that's located in your project.  Images that are not already present in the directory are copied there for you (how convenient!)

In addition to that, the beginning inklings of code generation support are in there.  That's intended really as a tease more than anything else.  There's not much there yet, but eventually DroidDraw will support some code generation to make your lives even easier!

Until then, you'll have to make do with coding by hand.  

As always, bugs/feature requests/cold hard cash -> brendan.d.burns on gmail.

New release (slightly delayed)

There is a new release of DroidDraw (r1b8).  Its a little late in arriving due to by recent bout with the dreaded flu.  This also caused me to miss the Boston Android campfire, I'm pretty disappointed about that.  Anyway, finally, I've got it together to release a new version, including standalone applications for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Highlights include:

• Support for loading, editing and saving strings.xml, colors.xml and arrays.xml resources in an easy, intuitive manner.
• The addition of AnDroidDraw an application which runs on an Android device/emulator and allows DroidDraw to download GUI layouts to the handheld device for previewing.

Enjoy!

Full Support for Android-m5

Well, after a few days of hacking, I'm happy to say that DroidDraw now has (as far as I can tell) nearly full support for the latest release of the Android SDK.  Check it out at: droiddraw.org.

I'm still working on some upcoming changes for the new stand-alone release (cool stuff, I promise you!)  

But in the meantime, if you crave the latest DroidDraw as a standalone, the .jar file is a double-clickable executable on most platforms (or you can run java -jar droiddrawr1b7.jar)

Please let me know if you run into any problems with the generated layout files and Android SDK m5.

Thanks!

Would you like roses with that release?

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm down in NYC (installing a very cool piece of robotic art at Exit Art in Chelsea) and away from my sweetheart [don't worry, we're going out to a belated valentine's dinner tomorrow...]

This means I have a chance to begin to hack DroidDraw to work with the new Android SDK.

So, release r1b6 is now available (applet only).  The only major change is that the "id" attribute in the layout .xml is now "android:id" per the changes in the new SDK.

Currently the new Android default GUI look and feel is not supported.  I will work on incorporating this in the coming week.  I expect to have it done by the Boston campfire on Feb. 23rd which I will be attending (and talking about DroidDraw...)

Please let me know if you find anything that breaks.  I've already discovered several small changes in the layout .xml.

Release B5

Well, it took me longer between releases this time (Real Life (tm) got in the way I'm afraid). But DroidDraw-r1b5 is now available in the usual places.  

Hilights include:

• Support for the DatePicker widget
• Opening/Editing of strings.xml and colors.xml (Standalone only)
• Loading/Drawing ImageButtons/ImageViews with android:src="@drawable/foo"

As always, send comments/bugs/donations to brendan.d.burns on gmail.

No changes, just a digression...

So I was coding today (sadly on a project related to RealLife (tm) and not DroidDraw), and I was thinking about something:

One of my big pet-peeves is people who write:

if (boolean-exp)

  return true [or even worse] boolean-exp

else

  return false

Because, obviously, it should simply be:

return boolean-exp;

But what about (assuming 2 unrelated boolean expressions boolean-exp-1 & boolean-exp-2):

if (boolean-exp-1)

   return boolean-exp-2;

else

  return false;

Now, by boolean logic, you could combine these into:

return (boolean-exp-1) && (boolean-exp-2);

which is equivalent. 

But should you?  I can't decide.

On the one hand, the latter is more concise.  But I feel like it looses some of the meaning, because it merges the two boolean conditions into a single condition which might be confusing to later maintainers of the code who don't have the original insight.

By the way, I know that there is another option in many languages:

return (boolean-exp-1)?boolean-exp-2:false;

But that's just magic concisi-fying syntactic sugar applied to the earlier code.

New release and new tutorial.

I've packaged up new standalone executables for release r1b4.  These executables incorporate all of the bug fixes and additions from the previous few beta releases (b2, b3) as well as a couple of small bug fixes from beta 3.  All are now available from DroidDraw.org

Perhaps more importantly, I have also put together a second tutorial on how to use DroidDraw.  This time it deals with how to use TableLayout to layout a simple input dialog from a user.  You can find the tutorial here.   If you missed it, the earlier DroidDraw tutorial can be found here.

As always, please send comments/questions/bugs/donations to me at brendan.d.burns on gmail or to the issues list.

Later.

DroidDraw-r1b3

New release as promised.  It includes some bug fixes, and enhancements including:

• Support for the Gallery widget
• Support for line breaks in TextViews, Buttons, EditText and AutocompleteText
• Misc. bug fixes mentioned previously.

I'll package it up into an .exe, etc. eventually.  For now if you're impatient, the .jar file is a double-clickable executable.

As always bugs/comments/donations/insults -> brendan.d.burns on gmail.

Later!

More (Software) Bug Squashing

My posts will be mostly on topic I promise, but I had to make note of something silly.   I use adsense to generate a (small) stream of income to begin to support DroidDraw development.  I've made $7 so far!  [hey, it covers my hosting costs for the month ;-)].

Anyway, this blog has mostly dealt with bug fixes.  So what does adsense try to sell me today? A kit for dealing with bed bugs.  I find this amusing.  Knock on wood that the only bugs I continue to need to squish are the software variety!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Bugs squished today:

• Improve the handling of padding and background colors
• Improve the handling of baseline
• Clean up LinearLayout
• Support for the GridView widget

This is all now checked into SVN.  I'll put together a full release by the end of the weekend.

Beta 2...

Well, a release a day keeps the doctor away, right?

The big changes for this release are:

• Padding now works correctly (background colors, and sizing)
• You can now drag and drop widgets between layouts [pretty cool, huh?]

I'm not going to make apps of this release.  (can't have too many standalone versions...) but for those interested in the bleeding edge, the .jar file is a double-clickable executable.

Beta One Released!

I finally got some new standalone apps. built and I christen them r1b1!  

• Mac OS X
• Windows
• Linux/Unix
• Platform Independent .jar

My first beta (for DroidDraw at least) my mother must be so proud ;-)

Anyhow, these new standalones contain all of the bug fixes mentioned previously and a few more improvements to slight to really mention.

Unless people find glaring bugs, I think the next step will be converting the app. to a true MVC paradigm.  (Right now, each widget knows how to draw itself, which violates MVC since the widgets are part of the M, not the V)

Chances are that will take me a little while.  Plus the tri-mester starts up soon, so development may slow down for a while.   Have fun! (and a happy new year!)