New Home Screen

Just released aJudge 3 this morning. This release focuses on making the application more stable and easier to use. As you can see there is a totally new home screen that should simplify aJudge for first-time users.

I also added integration with the Android Gallery. You can select any image from your gallery and rate it then send the image to your friends.

Thanks to the bug reports over the past couple months. They have been very helpful in dealing with some of the memory issues in aJudge. I think I’ve fixed them. Please click the report button if you get any FCs.

Also fixed in this release were the icons and graphics (specifically the scorecard) on low resolution devices. I’ve tested these on a variety of devices and emulators now and aJudge should look a lot better.

A big complaint with the app before was that the swipe gesture was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough. The sensitivity is now adjustable in the preferences available via the menu.

• Added About tab with live count of recipes available (if Internet access is available)
• Ingredients are now remembered between sessions
• Ingredients can be selected or de-selected for quick access to commonly used ingredients
• Added ability to sort recipe search results by name or by rating
• Fixed overlapping ads with content
• Fixed size of ingredient field

The key takeaway is that there are three densities, low, medium, and high. Based on the current device your app is running on, drawables are loaded differently. The issue I was having was on low density screens where my drawables for the scorecard font in aJudge were being scaled much bigger than the native resolution of the image. It turns out, if your image is in just the drawables directory of your app, Android will scale it up or down to meet the density of the device. For me they were being scaled up. Once I figured this out, it was just a matter of using a matrix to do a RectToRect scale from the original image to relative coordinates of the scorecard image.

The bottom line is, if you’re doing any low level drawing with pixels, especially bitmaps, make sure you adjust your coordinates based on the screen density. And when you test, have multiple emulators with different screen densities to test it on.

• Fixed forced close if SD Card is not available
• Fixed setting camera parameters on phones without flashes
• Fixed scorecard image having numbers out of alignment on some screens

• Fixed game resets
• Removed title bar
• Added “move to SD” support for Froyo users
• Added support for Android 1.6 (Donut) users
• Players can now be renamed and deleted (long tap)

I’ve already started on v1.5 and expect to have it ready during the week. This version will add support for Android v1.6 (Donut) devices and Move to SD for those of you with Android v2.2 (Froyo). Also included will be renaming and deleting of individual players.

I plan on publishing what I learn about Android development as time permits. I’m in the process of finishing up a masters degree so this may not happen as often as I like.