It's ALIVE!!!!

/ Noe Valley/

AdSense Dashboard 3.1 is alive!!!

For those who've been wondering, life's been a little busy lately. Since moving to Mountain View, I've taken over the role of TL lead and Manager on the advertiser's side frontend of our Display business at Google, what we call the 'Content AdWords Frontend' in Google.

That's left me with precious little time; I first knew about 1.2 six months or more before it got released, and knew I'd have to migrate the dashboard to the API - but I ended up moving to Mountain View to take on this role before I had the chance to do so.

Now that my other major project, Search and Display Select is launched, I have a moment to take a breath and fix the dashboard.

Now, keep in mind I still want everyone to move over to the official app - but it's also true that it's 4.0+ only, and I supported folks on Froyo.

Froyo is no more. If you're still on Froyo, go buy a phone, the OS is much nicer now and you'll be happy you did.

So the AdSense Dashboard is Gingerbread or later now. I've gone and changed a few things to make it easier to maintain and take some of the pain away - including to moving to Play Services for authentication. (Auth used to be particularly ugly under the hood.)

New navigation hierarchy

  • Local TimeZone everywhere. Everyone but Google thinks in their local timezone. So timezone reporting isn't optional; the app works in the timezone you gave AdSense.
  • A new widget that supports resizing and lockscreen use.
  • Goodbye, ViewPager. It was broken anyways, and we now have way too many reports to just blindly page through.
  • Hello, Navigation The new design paradigm on Android is an ActionBar button linked to a navigation drawer; now that we have navigation, we've added more reporting.
  • New reports Ad unit and site reporting have been added.
  • More data A full set of metrics on all of the reports we show.
  • Pull To Refresh Because I was wrong, Nick.
  • New icons While playing with the navigation drawer I found we needed some kind of visual indicator. I wanted scaleable icons that worked at all DPIs, but was way too lazy to actually go and make icons of all of those sizes. Enter FontAwesome, a font with a host of icons of just the right style and use case; that, plus a customised TextView that supports specifying a font, and a bit of aggressive caching of typography, and we've got some icons in the app now.
  • Use of typography I switched everything over to the fonts that are used in JellyBean and KitKat, Roboto. This is temporary, until I can find (or get around to buying for app embedding) something like Trafalgar and Requiem
  • API 1.4 introduced a change I've been begging for since the first version of the API; at least some of this happened because they're now seeing these problems for themselves as users of the API.
  • Rewrite of networking I rewrote the networking to make a single batch request at the same time I moved to Play Services for authentication. The refactor cut the amount of code I had in the app by more than half.
  • Use of Play Services SDK Play Services adds a lot of critical support for doing auth properly across a wider range of devices.

And, of course, moving off of the v1.2 API, which is what broke the app for all of October and November.

I did this in two stages - a 3.0 release in November, and a 3.1 release just a few days ago to make use of some of the earlier cleanup.

Along the way, I cleaned up a bunch of code, imported the 1.4 libraries, followed the daisy chain of required updates, moved to Android Studio, deleted all of that and switched to the maven repository, fixed all the maven conflicts, updated to later versions of support libraries, rewrote a bunch of stuff that the support library changes broke, etc. This has been, undoubtedly, a massive yak shaving exercise; but it's better off now.

We'll see where things go next; as always, send me your feature requests, complaints, and general chatter to the support address.