Category Archives: Android

Android, Auto Respond, Epilepsy

Thanksgiving Update

I’ve spent a LOT of time the last few days, making what seems like minimal progress.  Some things get exceedingly complicated when you start using more complicated views to display things. The upside is that it makes things look and feel better for the user.

All of that being said, I got the checkbox on the schedules working. It took me almost an entire work day to do it, but I did it. Schedules can now be activated/deactivated from the checkbox on the list of schedules, OR from within the edit screen for each individual schedule.

While doing this, I also found and fixed some bugs in the editing/deleting process for the schedules (luckily I found them before releasing the scheduler as a feature.)

All that is left now is creating the alarm activity to trigger the start and end of the schedule, then acting on that alarm to actually enable/disable Auto Respond.

ETA:

I don’t like giving an actual ETA, but I’m hoping to have the scheduler done by the end of this weekend. I probably won’t do any programming today, but I might get some done tomorrow, and I’ll likely spend some time on it on Saturday and possibly Sunday as well.

That being said, if it’s completed by the end of the weekend, I’ll probably test it during the week, and hopefully release it near the end of the week (assuming I don’t run into many bugs.)

As I’ve stated before, this will be a PAID ONLY feature. If you click on “New Schedule” in the free version, it will prompt you to purchase the paid version.



REMINDER: If you purchase the paid version before the end of the month, all proceeds go to the Epilepsy Foundation for Epilepsy Awareness Month! I haven’t gotten many purchases this month, but I have gotten a few. I would be very grateful (and so would the Foundation) if some of you made a purchase before the end of the month.

If you do purchase after the end of the month, and would still like your purchase to be donated, email me and I will make the donation.

Side note: It would be nice to see some ratings and feedback in the Play Store too! 😉

For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving today, I wish you all a happy and SAFE holiday! Please be careful while travelling, and use caution when cooking for yourselves, your families, and/or your guests.

Android, Auto Respond

Scheduler is almost there!

I’ve been working on the schedule for Auto Respond a lot recently. Today, I finished the ability to edit/delete the schedules.

It may sound like a minor victory to you as a reader, but it took a LOT of work to get this working properly. (Mostly because I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t able to click/long-click the schedule list. Once I figured out what was going on there, it wasn’t too bad.)

Things that still need work:

  • The checkbox on the list of schedules currently does nothing
    • Eventually it will activate/deactivate individual schedules
  • The schedules themselves still do nothing
    • When the schedules are activated/deactivated I need to set an “alarm” which is acted upon
    • When the “alarm” is triggered, I need to enable/disable auto respond and change the current message
While doing this, I think I may have figured out what my problem was when trying to build a widget. Just like the list items, I couldn’t click on the widget once it was created. So if I apply the same logic to the widget, I may be able to get it working the way I want it. Right now I’m on a role with the scheduler, so I’m going to finish that before going back to the widgets.
With any luck, I’ll have the scheduler done in a week or so, maybe less. It depends on how much programming I want to do this holiday weekend, and how much trouble I run into with the alarm activity. (In theory, the alarm activity shouldn’t be too bad, but we’ll see what happens.)
Android, Auto Respond

Auto Respond 0.10.3

More bug fixes mostly with this update.

  • Fixed an issue that may make it impossible to edit the title of a message in the “Preset Messages” list
  • Fixed an issue with deleting preset messages
  • Changed layout of “Preset Messages” list
The “Preset Messages” list now shows the name of the message, and the actual message. As I work more with layouts I am learning how to do things like this, so I go back and improve existing features. 
As I was working on the new layout, and getting it to display properly, I realized that the way I was handling deleting messages was not correct. I was missing some important pieces of the process. I was deleting the message, but I was not decrementing the list properly if there were more messages after the one that was being deleted. This led to some VERY unexpected side effects if you did something like delete the first message in a list of 5 messages.
This has been taken care of. When you delete a message the list should do exactly as you expect it to do, regardless of the position of the message within the list of messages.
I eventually want to work on sorting this list, but that will come in the future. (I just officially put it on my to-do list)
As usual, I have published this update to the Play Store, but it may not be available for another hour or 2.

Android, Auto Respond

Progress on the Scheduler

I have made some good progress on the scheduler today and yesterday. Schedules are saving, and they are displaying correctly in a list on the scheduler tab.

I still have to work on editing and deleting the schedules once they are created, and actually scheduling an action once the day/time of the start and end of the schedule occur, but I did actually make a lot of progress. I also made a lot of changes to what the schedule list looks like (not that you guys know what it looked like before, but I spent a LOT of time perfecting it.)

Here’s what it looks like right now:

Those are all dummy schedules, setup to show a variety of different possible configurations for the schedule (and a variety of different use cases.)

The End Goal:

Each of those schedules has a message specific to the schedule, which is set at the creation of each individual schedule. Therefore, you can set the meeting message to say “I’m in a meeting, I’ll be out at 9.” and you can set the class message to say “Busy learning math,  I’ll be available around noon.” As stated above, I will be working on the ability to edit these messages, and the rest of the detail of each schedule. Editing and deleting will be available upon long-pressing the schedule, just like how the list of preset messages works. (At least, that’s the plan as of now.)

When the schedules trigger, they will set the current message and turn on Auto Respond. When the scheduled event ends, it will return Auto Respond to its previous on/off state, and return your message to whatever it was before the beginning of the scheduled event. (This behavior may end up becoming an option – whether you would prefer it to return to the previous state at the end of a scheduled event, or turn off at the end of the scheduled event regardless of the previous state.)

Unfortunately, none of that actually happens yet. What you see here is basically what is working, and nothing more. It displays, it doesn’t actually work yet.

I will continue to work on getting this working whenever I have free time. I have decided that this WILL be a paid-only feature. If you want the scheduler ability, you will have to pay $.99 for the paid app.

Android, Auto Respond

Auto Respond 0.10.2

Auto Respond 0.10.2 has been published to the Play Store. It may be an hour or 2 until it is live on Google’s servers, but it has been posted. All of the bugs from the list earlier today are fixed. I tested on both 4.1 and 2.3 devices, and both are verified working. Changes made in settings screen will now happen immediately in all Android versions as well.

Free:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespondfree

Paid:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespond

Again, I am going to ask people to PLEASE report any bugs you may find. If you don’t report them, I may not know that they exist. If you send me an email about a bug, at least then I know it exists and can look into fixing it ASAP. So far, all of the bugs I have fixed are things that I have found myself.

Also, if you have any feature requests, let me know. I can add them to my to-do list.

Android, Auto Respond, Epilepsy, Euchre

Back to coding

I know it has been a while since I’ve done anything new… It has been a busy month. I started doing some more coding this week, and I’ve found and fixed a few bugs. (Why does nobody tell me about these?? If you find bugs PLEASE send me an email so that I can fix it!)

Here’s some stuff I’ve been working on:

Auto Respond:

1) A pretty big bug fix – I noticed that Auto Respond would sometimes toggle itself off. I was wondering why… what is causing this. It seemed kind of random, but I finally figured it out. It was something in the Dock Settings Menu. I figured out what was causing the problem, and it has been fixed. (It may not have been an issue if the dock options were not enabled. I’m also no 100% sure that this bug affected the free version.)

2) I fixed a small bug on the schedule tab, which cause 12pm to be shown as 0pm when using 12-hour clock.

2a) While on the subject of the scheduler, the changes made in the SDK have set me WAY back in the development of the scheduler. They depreciated some of the code I was using, and I need to figure out how to use the new methods.

3) I’ve made settings on 4.0+ devices take effect immediately. I’m not sure if the same is true for Pre-4.0 devices. (I know I tried it once, but it didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped.)

4) Google just released a new SDK, so I’m going to look at the new options in the SDK and the “support” API to see if there is a way for me to unify the menu across Android versions again.

5) I don’t think anything needs to be changed for the app to support Android 4.2, but I will be looking into that as well. (Especially once some 4.2 ROMs are released for the Galaxy Nexus, and I can test on an actual device.) I would actually like to look into the possibility of adding something into the “quick settings” area of 4.2. Not sure if apps have the ability to add toggles to that list, but it would be cool if I could make that a reality.

These changes are still a work in progress, and are not fully tested as of now. I will likely be fully testing them, across multiple Android versions, in a couple days. Once they are fully tested, and confirmed working properly, I will release an update.

As always, the app is available on the play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespond
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havens1515.autorespondfree

Both versions are still purple for epilepsy awareness month, and all purchases of the paid version still go to the Epilepsy Foundation.

GUI Euchre:

I have some changes that will be made in my Euchre game as well. I’ve found a few small issues (listed in the known issues document on the download page) and I plan on fixing those later this week. Not too many people actively use that program, so it’s a little lower on my to-do list. The issues that are present are not pressing issues either. They do not greatly effect the usability of the program, they’re just small things that annoy me when I play.

I want to take some extra time to re-do the AI in the game as well. Since I programmed it, I find it a little too predictable. There are also times when I think the computer players call trump too often, or they take risks that are not necessary to take, and other times they are quite risky enough. I want to add some more random events into their logic, making the players a little less predictable, but also try to make them play smarter. Some of my logic is built on too specific triggers, and I want to work on that.

Having never taken a class or read anything about AI design, I am learning as I go. It’s kinda tough to teach yourself a concept like AI design, but I think I’m doing pretty well with it. I would like to eventually be able to build in selectable play styles, or difficulty settings, but that’s kinda tough to do in a game like euchre. I’d first need to learn different play styles, then perfect them, then program them.

if you want to check out the Euchre game (as it is now) you can get it here: bit.ly/GUIEuchre

Android, Auto Respond, Epilepsy

Auto Respond for Epilepsy Awareness!

As I said in my last post, this month is Epilepsy Awareness Month.
I have decided to turn Auto Respond purple for the month. My icons and my Play Store banner have been turned purple instead of their normal blue and green.

On top of changing the color, ALL money that is made from the sale of the paid version of Auto Respond during November will be donated equally between the National Epilepsy foundation (http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/) and my local branch of the Epilepsy Foundation. (http://www.epilepsyuny.org/) My local branch has done WAY too much for me, my family, and my friends to not include them specifically.

70% of all sales in the Play Store go to me, the rest goes to cell carriers. ALL of that 70% will go from my bank account, to the Epilepsy Foundation at the end of the month. I will not keep 1 cent of the sales that I make this month.

Unfortunately, I do not know if there is a way to get 100% of your purchase to charity, but my 70% can still make a difference!

If you would like to donate, separate from your purchase, you can do so here:
https://secure2.convio.net/efa/site/Donation2?df_id=1774&1774.donation=form1
or here:
http://www.epilepsyuny.org/donate.htm

Donations from the “Donate” link in my app can also be sent to the Epilepsy Foundation. Just include a note when you donate that you would like that donation to go to the Epilepsy Foundation. (The money will initially go to me, but I WILL make sure it gets to the foundation at the end of the month!)

Android, Auto Respond

Auto Respond 0.10.1

0.10 doesn’t load the Settings screen properly on pre Android 4.0 devices, so I had to scramble to get some workaround code. It’s back to normal for now, I’ll start working on a solution that works cross-version, since my current setup obviously does not. (The Settings menu shows slightly differently depending on your Android version, but it will work on all devices now regardless of version.)

0.10.1 has been published to the market but, as usual, it will take an hour or so for Google’s servers to push it out.

Android, Auto Respond

Auto Respond 0.10

I have published Auto Respond 0.10 on the Play Store. Some of this was actually included in previous releases (0.9.2 or so), but I included all of it in this changelog.

Big things:

• The Android SDK changed to make it a lot harder to have the menu setup the way I did, so I had to put everything into categories
• Added a couple new options: notifications are totally optional now, with an additional option for it to be permanent, and there is now an option for vibrate as well as silent
• Added more info into the JB style notifications

Small things:

• Fixed a few small bugs
• Added “Cancel” to the long-press menu for the list of messages

Full Changelog here: http://bit.ly/Rmi6Wf

The new version should be live in the Play Store as soon as the Google servers are updated (an hour or so usually.)

Android, Auto Respond

More Work on Notifications

I’ve been playing around a lot with notifications. I enhanced the JB style notifications more. They now tell you your current message, how many replies were sent, and provide a list of contact names that have been replied to.

I also made separate options of “Show Notifications” and “Permanent Notification”. If only “Show Notifications” is on, you will see a notification every time a response is sent and the notification will be able to be cleared. If both “Show” and “Permanent” are on, there will be a permanent notification, as it works now. If neither are on, the app will not display a notification at all.

I may throw them into a new sub-category of settings, and I will likely keep building on the current options. (Especially for Android 4.1+ users.) If you have any ideas, suggestions, etc. feel free to let them be heard!

These notification enhancements have not been released yet, but I will let you all know when they are!

Also, I’ve been working with ad displays in the free version. I may have overlooked something stupid, and there may not have been an issue in the first place. I am still working with Tap for Tap on some other lingering issues, but I’m not sure if there were any issue with ads displaying properly or not. If anyone has any feedback as to whether or not you are seeing ads in the free version, it would be appreciated. (If you’re not now, I’ve confirmed that they will be displaying correctly in future versions.)