Alice on Android

Alice is now Gigstar

Tim — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:09:14 +0000

I’ve been working on a total rewrite of Alice which I have renamed to Gigstar.

Just finishing testing this week and then I will release.

There will be no more posts here as the new site is on my blog here:

2.2 Released

Tim — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:27:35 +0000

So I learnt a few things about Android:

Don’t expect threads to survive outside the lifespan of the activity that created them – use a service instead.
BroadcastReceivers will die after a while if you put long running processes in them.
The suggested fixes for the VerifyError bug on 1.5 related to mapping do not work.

Hopefully Alice is more stable now though I’m sure there are bugs lurking around the place.

2.0.13 Released

Tim — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:59:21 +0000

This should fix the 1.5 Force Close issue caused by an Android OS bug. If it doesn’t, I give up!

Released 2.0.10

Tim — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:48:40 +0000

Still trying to fix all the 1.5 Force Close issues – unfortunately this release didn’t work *sigh*

I’ll have to crack out Google to try and solve this one when I get some free time.

Full description of problem here.

My theory is that the error is caused by this bug.

I use a BroadcastReceiver to start the event updating service onBoot.

If my theory is correct then turning off the event syncing under preferences might stop the FCs.

I’ll probably do another release sometime this week/weekend.

Released 2.0.7

Tim — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:34:05 +0000

A bunch of Android 1.5 users have been sending me Crash Reports with the new crash reporting functionality I built. It seems that every now and then the OS decides to throw a VerifyError on a class which contains GeoPoint in its signature. I’ve even had this happen on my Hero once, but I think its something that happens every now and then and is a timing related bug in Cupcake. I wasnt able to consisently reproduce or even discover the cause – instead I am just catching the VerifyError when the class is instantiated (some of the functionality related to location might not work when this happens but hopefully it wont force close at least).

Released 2.0.5

Tim — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:06:46 +0000

Using the new Crash Report functionality made it pretty easy to find a common problem – when a user specifies a non-existent LastFM username it was Force Closing. This is fixed in version 2.0.5.

Release 2.0.4

Tim — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:21:46 +0000

Lately I have had a number of Force Close reports and a couple of Stack Traces sent to me, but there seems to be some elusive issue (either related or not related to maps?!?) which I havent managed to resolve yet. To get to the bottom of these issues and to stabilise the app, I added the ability to sent an Error Report to me if the application Force Closes.

Hopefully this will allow me to discover a bunch of problems I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of, with little user effort.

2.0.1 Released

Tim — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:56:29 +0000

This release was a rewrite of the searching functionality. Previously the search was pretty basic and not so useful. Now you can search by location and search includes pagination plus you can select the source you want to search as well. To make a search, simply hit the Search key and select ‘Events’ (Artists search is unchanged). If you do not specify a location to search, it will default to your current location.

This release also includes a few UI tweaks and minor bug fixes.

The free version also has some limited YouTube integration, as a teaser for the Paid version of Alice.

1.7.0

Tim — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:43:07 +0000

For the Full (Paid) Version I added some YouTube integration (relies on having the YouTube app installed). You can long press an artist and hit ‘Watch YouTube Videos’.

1.6.5 Released

Tim — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:01:42 +0000

Added Ads (AdMob) and introduced an ad free version for 3.5 Euros. The donation model really doesn’t work so well ($20 total for a months worth of development – lucky I still have a day job).
Old events should be cleansed on a daily basis now.