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!)