Androsm / Blog: Recent posts

The migration to Android Studio is completed and the native Android GUI of Androsm is starting to cover the very core functionality, so I'm planning to make a binary release of what is there.
This will be a release with alpha quality and the bare minimum of features: map moving and zooming, showing the current position if there is no user interaction. No way points, tracks, no searching or routing, let alone any of the more "exotic" features.
I will, probably tomorrow, put the remaining problems into tickets to make it easy - mainly for me - to see what needs to be done before release.
Although it will be an alpha, I'll label it 0.9 despite the features that are "lost", because I think it is a step forward from 0.8.6 because it has a proper Android GUI.
Plus if you have a phone without menu hardkey, which is quite common with newer Android versions, you can't get to the menu in 0.8.6 anyway. So anything is an improvement for users of those devices.

I didn't post anything here in November or December, but did some work on Androm nonetheless, both by improving features and by changing the build system.
As I had some glitches with the build in Eclipse (see the end of the "Compiling with Eclipse" page on the Wiki which I just updated) and because Google is dropping the Eclipse ADT plugin, I have moved to Android Studio.
I had to read about the gradle build first, because the export of a gradle build file in Eclipse ADT doesn't produce a working build and importing the project into Android Studio changes the directory structure, which I don't like. But I got it working, at least for the debug build - all necessary files should be in git.

I made good progress during the last days.
Map drawing is working except for dashed ways.
Positioning the map to the GPS position is also working again. This involves an architectural change - the interested objects register directly with the LocationProvider. The latter puts the data into the data objects (PosData mainly).
I also fixed some errors such as a crash when a POI icon could not be found in the map ZIP.
So I think a first binary release with native Android GUI - which will be more of an alpha release though - is not far away.

The native draw is now working - sort of:

I think this pretty much qualifies as modern art. :-) Maybe I should keep this mode to have some visual fun if one feels like it.
The problem shouldn't be too hard to fix, seems like the line path is (auto?) closed with a line back from the end to the beginning.
Oh, I just realized, the text labels and POI icons are missing...

It's been a while since the last blog entry, oh well.
But I've been doing some work, especially during the last months.

First of all I have to let you know that you won't get very far with the last binary release on devices with Android 3.0 or later if they don't have the menu function on a hard key (either short or long press).
I wasn't aware of that, I thought all devices still have it at least on long press of the application key.... read more

Yesterday I pushed the changes to the SourceForge repository which switch to a native Android build, and some minutes ago I pushed a fix for a wrong class name in AndroidManifest.xml.
So Androsm now builds natively for Android, that's the good news.
It doesn't run yet, though. On startup, it crashes due to missing classes. This is what I need to investigate next.

Hi folks,

I thought I'd give a small status update as I haven't written anything for several months and unless you follow my commits (where the last one was also six weeks ago) you don't know what I'm on to.

Currently I'm struggling to build Androsm with the build process for Android apps instead of the J2MEPolish build process. The incentive for this is probably clear, only then can I layout the screens using the graphical designers for it etc.... read more

Hello everybody,

I forgot yesterday to announce in this blog that 0.8.6 is out.
The setup problems are solved, but it's not flawless yet.
Please read WHATSNEW.txt for more information.

I will now move forward by trying to move Androsm more towards a real Android application, by decreasing dependency on the J2MEPolish framework.
I think this is inevitable to achieve two things.
The first is to give Androsm a real Android UI instead of a UI which is limited to the capabilities of the LCDUI API of J2ME and which is emulated on Android.
The second is to solve several issues, which may or may not be caused by J2MEPolish.

I have fixed the problem because of which I removed release 0.8.5, maybe you have already noticed if you browsed through the commits.
But now I'm seeing other problems which I think should be fixed before release.
Especially, the behaviour is different and more confusing (map source dialog seems to be hanging) if GPS has not been turned on.
So it will take me some more hours of debugging until I will have a version which is acceptable for me. What I'm hoping to achieve is a version which doesn't require the user to guess and try until map setup has eventually been completed successfully. Instead, all problems (some will most probably remain due to the way startup works in GpsMid which is still the way it also works in Androsm) should be reported properly if they appear.
Please be patient. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog to stay up to date?

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
Due to the bug described in ticket #10, new users won't be able to set up the map data, thus rendering Androsm useless.
I didn't notice because I got Androsm set up when I installed it for the first time some weeks ago. Something must have been different in my development version back then.

I have removed the files, which are useless for anybody else but me, from the download area.
I will fix the problem ASAP and provide a new version.