Crash reporting android apps

I started using https://www.crittercism.com for crash reporting of my photo frame app. It only makes the app 40 kB bigger (peanuts on a 1Mb app) but sends the stacktrace automatically to their servers.
Where I normally receive one or two crash reports a day, it was soon clear to me that the problem is a lot bigger than that. Thanks to the detailed stack trace, I was able to resolve most of the problems really quick.

On a daily basis I have 300 people checking out my app but only 100 or less keeping it. Now it is clear to me why. Most of these users run into a crash that does not occur on my test devices. I hope the number of users that keep my app will be higher now and that the current users will have a more stable app.

New app : Tel/SMS shortcut

I released a new app to create shorcuts to start a call directly from your home screen or to send a predefined sms to one of your contacts. Just a little productivity tool, I use myself a lot.

Tell me what you think!

Android development tools

I created a bitbucket repository containing some unix scripts and groovy scripts I use when developing android applications. I will continue adding things as I need them. I hope somebody else gains time using these.
Let me know if you use them and feel free to add things in the bitbucket repository.

Currently it contains a conversion script from svg to png's in the different sizes needed and conversion from strings.xml location files to a csv and the other way round to ease collaboration with another team doing the translation. The wiki should explain more.

Special networks

By default the photoframe app searches servers in the local network which is fine for most of the users. But sometimes the server is not found or the server, you want to access, is in a different network (could be over VPN for example). In that case, you can enter the server name or its ip address in the options menu and then only that server will be shown. No network scanning is done at that point so the only server you will see is the one you entered.
Unfortunately this only works for the network option, not for upnp. If anyone knows how to get this working with the cling framework or just how it works with UPNP. I already found this interesting page explaining UPNP. Since it works with UDP unicast it doesn't seem to be easy to do. I should be able to skip the discover state and add a device with the fixed ip directly.

Bugfixing

Thank you all for your bug reports. When the application force closes, sending me the bug report is of great help. I go through each of them to check how I can resolve them best.
Please also think about the device you are using and the photo's to show. While a tablet will be ok with 15 megapixel photo's, a phone with small resolution will struggle to show them. Best is to resize the photos beforehand on a more performant pc. This is even more important when these are located on a network share.

So feel free to send me more errors!

Photo frame preferences

I updated the preferences page of digital photo frame to the android standard for options. I'm still learning the android platform and finding nice features. Thanks to google for a great SDK.

A user wanted to see pictures he adds to a network folder while the app is running. You can find a setting to configure an update interval in which the app should look for new photos. By default this is set to off because I'm unsure of the performance impact of this feature. Seemed to work very well on my tablet but how will it run on a phone?

Next I continue to improve the single photo view with sharing to other apps and view next and previously displayed photos.

Memory and performance

I took a look to the bug reports people sent to me (thanks for that) and fixed a number of memory and performance issues. For other android developers working with (potentially) large images, take a look at inSampleSize when loading the bitmap.Because I'm loading bitmaps over the network, the faster I can handle them, the faster I can show them to the user.

Next I'll be working at advanced layouts. Not sure what to do after that. Anyone suggestions?

UPNP

Released a new version which is more stable than before and should be more responsive since more threading is used, especially when loading photos over the network.

Next I'm working to implement UPNP as a photo source. That will be the last source of photos. I don't plan on implementing a flickr or picasa source unless there is enough demand for that.

Digital Photo Frame

Released an ad free version today for a low price. Thank you for supporting me!

Also added new functionality recently. You can click on an image and show it fullscreen. The application stops showing new images at that moment. This is very useful if you are just watching the photos pass by but wants to stop at a certain photo.

Photo frame 1.4

A new release having important new functionality. I included the selection of windows network shares using samba. Currently only anonymous accessable network shares are supported.

Next up is a list of recently used folders (local or network share) so you don't have to navigate every time if you use the same folder often.

Photo Frame 1.0

The release of the first version of my photo frame application is a fact. It is a simple but usable application to view your photo's as a digital photo frame would show them.

I plan on enhancing on it further especially with more possibilities to open file on different locations.

Any other suggestions are welcome but since it is more a hobby project I can't give any guarantees if it will be developed and when.

I hope you have as much fun of the application as I had developing it.