Well here’s my very first YouTube video…it’s a demo of MediaDroid. Certainly not perfect, but I think it gets the job done and I’m stick’n with it!
Here’s the link in case the embed doesn’t work
Just released a brand new version of MediaDroid. Thanks to some reverse engineering of the Android Image Gallery, I’ve been able to greatly increase the performance and stability of the app. Hopefully I’ll be able to get into the specific changes (for all the Android developers out there) in a later post when I get a little more time. Also, improved the button icons thanks to my son’s (OK…they where mine first) Crayons (TM).
Already have plans for some more features (filtering the image buckets shown in the Image Gallery) and with this re-write out of the way I think I’ll be able to get the next version out sooner.
Cheers, and thanks for all the support from the current users of MediaDroid, it’s great to hear all your feedback…good and bad!!
As I’ve been alluding to in my Twitter feed, I’m on the cusp of deploying a new version of MediaDroid, huge re-write to image gallery, but hopefully I’ll get a post about that out later. Anyway, the previous way I was marking the images to be included in the albums was to have a combo view with a check box and a thumbnail of the image. Although this works, it takes up a lot of screen real estate and isn’t terribly efficient. The next version of the image gallery I wrote extended the Android ImageView class and although this solution isn’t much more efficient (the solution for that is in my newest version), it certainly increases the number of images viewed at a time.
Here’s a quick code snippet to determine if the GPS is on, and if it isn’t go to the Setting screen allowing the user to turn it on. Android does not allow a 3rd party app to automatically turn the GPS on/off as of 1.5, a “feature” discussed extensively on the Android Developers Forum.
I posted a new version of both MediaDroid and Message Drop to the Android Market this morning.
The new version of MediaDroid fixes the reboot bug. It’s not as elegant as a fix as I’d like but it does work. FYI to any developers, the SD Card isn’t necessarily mounted when the ACTION_BOOT_COMPLETED event is broadcast. I used a CountDownTimer to wait 30 seconds after my BroadcastReceiver is called, then I’m able to access the files on the SD Card.
I added a couple features to Message Drop and fixed a few bugs. The new features are spelled out on the Message Drop page and include a new Setting for assigning the “Blank Tag” and a mode helping you build bulleted item lists.
My plan is to switch back to MediaDroid and perform some much needed polishing, and I ran into a Force Close that I haven’t been able to track down yet. Always more to do!
This is my call to arms for all Android users…buy more apps and talk about them, show them to your friends family and co-workers, blog about them, tweet about them, post pictures, let’s talk this shit up! Everyone is comparing Android to the iPhone or Palm…you’re wasting your time, let’s spend those valuable keystrokes talking about how awesome the apps are on Android market and not trying to make comparisons to other platforms. The more marketing buzz we can create about Android apps and how hard the single developers or small dev shops are working to create these products the better it is for all of us. Not only do I want my apps to be successful but I’d love to hear about Phil Symonds making a million bucks on Abduction or how the college students who developed Heat paid their way through college developing Android apps.
So, show some love, and make sure to spend the buck or two for the app which that guy or gal spent many’a hours creating and testing…and let others know also. I hope all this doesn’t sound to much like self promotion, but I really believe that it behooves all of us to have a vibrant and profitable Android app market.
Using a Service and ACTION_SCREEN_OFF I’ve successfully added a new feature to MediaDroid which cycles the images in your photo album. Every time the screen is put to sleep, the next photo in the album is placed in the photo widget on the Home screen of your Android device. Here’s a code snippet…
public class ChangeImageService extends Service
{
private static final boolean LOGD = Constants.LOGD;
private BroadcastReceiver _receiver;
private static final String LOG_TAG = "ChangeImageService";
@Override
public void onCreate()
{
super.onCreate();
_receiver = new BroadcastReceiver()
{
public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent)
{
loadNextImage();
}
};
IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_OFF);
registerReceiver(_receiver, filter);
}
....
}
A couple of gotchas you have to watch out for… The ACTION_SCREEN_OFF Intent does not get picked up from the AndroidManifest.xml file so you have to assign it in code as shown above. Also, I put the assignment in the onCreate method because the Service can get killed off. If the Service is killed off, Android will schedule it to restart, but in order to catch the Screen Off broadcasts the Service must sign up again in the onCreate method…at least, this is what worked for me and all seems to be going well. As always, the docs are a little sparse and I had to go through some trial and error to figure it out, but I’m pretty happy with the results.
The new feature (along with a bug fix) is available in both the Trial and Full version of MediaDroid in the Android market…check em out and let me know what you think!
I’m pretty excited about this…don’t remember how I found Nilvec, but thanks to a pair of blogs on their site I’ve been able to integrate dispatching of emails directly into Note To Me (this feature isn’t yet available for the version in the Android market) so the user doesn’t have to go through the Gmail client, very slick. Check out these posts…
Sending Email Without User Interaction In Android
They packaged the Apache classes very nicely and made it easy to get the email set up and running. Now for all the other features that are needed because I’m implementing my own email client…ie, making sure the emails are sent later if there is no wireless connection.
Just wanted to post a quick note that I’ve released a full version of MediaDroid to the Android Market. I’ve got lots more feature coming up and there’s a couple of bugs to iron out, but I think it’s feature complete enough for a first version.
Would love to get your feedback, good or bad! More information with screen shots at http://www.mgmblog.com/mediadroid.
Been awhile since I’ve posted any code and thought it was about time. The image gallery has definitely been one of the most challenging parts of the MediaDroid application so far. I even seem to have uncovered a bug in one of the earlier versions. But thanks to some advice from the Google I/O talk by Romain Guy I settled on an implementation using SoftReferences and the AsyncTask class. If you have more experience with threading then I do, I’d be interested in your opinion!
The task of the ImageCache is to load Bitmaps as they are requested. From the outside the Bitmaps are requested using the get method which takes the Uri of the Bitmap to load, and the ImageView which will eventually be updated with the Bitmap. A single thread waits for the requests or jobs as I call them to be added to a job list.
The ImageCache follows the Singleton pattern and is initiated using the follow call,
ImageCache.getInstance().executeLoadImagesTask( context );
This call initiates a thread which waits for jobs to be posted on the job list.
A Bitmap is retrieved from the ImageCache with the following call
Bitmap bm = ImageCache.getInstance().get( _thumbUri.toString(), _imgVw );
If the image isn’t initially in the cache, a default Bitmap is returned, then a job is added to the job list. This job contains the Uri to the Bitmap and and the ImageView to update when the Bitmap is done loading.
I also extended ImageView to contain a Uri for the image it displays. When the image is loaded into the UriImageView it is checked against the one that is currently assigned. Otherwise, the ImageView will cycle through all the images that are loaded, kind of a cool effect, but not the best result for the UI.
As always, sorry for the funky formatting, someday I’ll find and install a proper CSS for computer code. Be weary of cut-n-paste, I’m not sure if I caught all the formatting issues.
public class ImageCache
{
private static final String LOG_TAG = "ImageCache";
private static final boolean LOGD = true;
private static ImageCache _instance = null;
private final HashMap<String, SoftReference<Bitmap>> _cache;
private Context _ctx;
private static Bitmap defaultBitmap;
private Object _lock;
private ArrayList<ImageJob> jobs = new ArrayList<ImageJob>();
public static ImageCache getInstance()
{
if ( _instance == null )
{
_instance = new ImageCache();
}
return _instance;
}
private ImageCache()
{
_lock = new Object();
_cache = new HashMap<String, SoftReference<Bitmap>>();
}
public void executeLoadImagesTask( Context ctx )
{
_ctx = ctx;
defaultBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource( _ctx.getResources(), R.drawable.camera_icon );
new LoadImagesTask().execute(null);
}
public void put( String key, Bitmap bitmap )
{
_cache.put( key, new SoftReference<Bitmap>(bitmap) );
}
public void clear()
{
_cache.clear();
}
public Bitmap get( String imguri, UriImageView viewToUpdate )
{
Bitmap bm = null;
SoftReference>Bitmap< reference = _cache.get(imguri);
if ( reference != null )
{
bm = reference.get();
}
if ( bm == null )
{
bm = defaultBitmap;
postJob( new ImageJob( imguri, viewToUpdate ) );
}
return bm;
}
/**
* Called after the bitmap has been retrieved bitmap from the
* sdcard
*
* @param jobs
*/
public void addImage( ImageJob... jobs )
{
ImageJob job = jobs[0];
final UriImageView view = job.getViewToUpdate();
final Bitmap bm = job.getBitmap();
final Uri imguri = job.getImageUri();
put( imguri.toString(), bm );
view.post( new Runnable() {
public void run()
{
view.setImage(imguri, bm);
}
});
}
private void dbg( String msg )
{
if (LOGD) Log.d( LOG_TAG, msg );
}
private void postJob( final ImageJob job )
{
dbg( "Thread: " + Thread.currentThread().getName() + " posting job " + job.getImageUri() );
synchronized(_lock)
{
jobs.add(job);
_lock.notify();
}
}
private class ImageJob
{
private Uri _imageUri;
private UriImageView _viewToUpdate;
private Bitmap _bm;
public ImageJob( Uri imageUri, UriImageView viewToUpdate )
{
_imageUri = imageUri;
_viewToUpdate = viewToUpdate;
}
public ImageJob( String imageUri, UriImageView viewToUpdate )
{
this( Uri.parse( imageUri ), viewToUpdate );
}
public Uri getImageUri()
{
return _imageUri;
}
public UriImageView getViewToUpdate()
{
return _viewToUpdate;
}
public void setBitmap( Bitmap bm )
{
_bm = bm;
}
public Bitmap getBitmap()
{
return _bm;
}
}
private class LoadImagesTask extends AsyncTask<Object, ImageJob, Integer>
{
@Override
protected Integer doInBackground(Object... params)
{
Thread.currentThread().setName( "LoadImagesTask" );
while( true )
{
int jobsize = 0;
synchronized( _lock )
{
jobsize = jobs.size();
}
if ( jobsize > 0 )
{
synchronized( _lock )
{
ImageJob job = jobs.remove(0);
dbg( "performing image job " + job.getImageUri() );
try
{
job.setBitmap( ImgUtils.buildBitmap(_ctx, job.getImageUri(), 4) );
onProgressUpdate( job );
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
else
{
try
{
synchronized( _lock )
{
dbg( "Thread: " + Thread.currentThread().getName() + " waiting for jobs" );
_lock.wait();
dbg( "Thread: " + Thread.currentThread().getName() + " got a job" );
}
}
catch (InterruptedException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
@Override
public void onProgressUpdate(ImageJob... job)
{
addImage( job );
}
@Override
public void onPostExecute(Integer imagesLoaded)
{
dbg( "loaded " + imagesLoaded + " images" );
}
}
}
Again, I’d love to hear any comments you may have about the implementation, one thing about bootstrapping and doing all the coding yourself is it’s much harder to find code reviewers!
MediaDroid
MediaDroid Trial
Message Drop
Message Drop Trial
Jumpy
