AdSense Dashboard 2.6

I’ve been pumping out dashboard changes for the last few days, based on feedback, bug reports, and general email discussions with users. Keep them coming - if you use the app, I want to hear from you.

Users on Eclair/Froyo got bit by a pretty nasty bug in the HTTP stack built into the phone; the common fix appears to be to not use that API on those platforms, so that’s what I’m doing.

New stuff:

  • Support for disabling auto-refresh.
  • Bugfixes for Eclair/Froyo. If it’s not fixed for you, I want to hear about it.
  • Device-specific compatibility bugfixes around currency and rounding.
  • Google TV support. This is a bit slapdash - I’ll improve it as I improve the tablet layout.
  • New widget (released as part of the 2.5 chain) by a contributor/coworker.

There’s a lot of activity going on this weekend and early next week; I intend to do a lot of ‘remastering’ of the numeric portion of the display to show more comparative data - today versus yesterday, today verus one week ago, this week verus last week, this month versus last month, etc., for a broader set of metrics than we currently include.

That will also be extracted into widget form - choose an arbitrary 1x1 fact.

Lifetime spend, custom channels, and url channels will also show up, in all probability.

Your feedback isn’t just welcome - it’s wanted. Ping me with your gripes, comments, suggestions, and requests.

Weatherman 1.3 now available in the Android Market

I’m looking forward to getting some feedback.  It’s been… I think I opened the github account on the 28th of December.  I built and threw away a live background that ran cellular automata, which I really, really wanted to do, but Android’s drawing routines just aren’t good enough/fast enough to really allow for that.  (The automata itself was happily running at 15fps, but the UI update was <3.  Boo.

A commit on the 30th of December is really the beginning of this app’s life.  Today’s the 6th.  In that time, I’ve done more obsessing than I care to admit; I’ve had a really good time building this, and while it’s not perfect, I’m a great deal happier with the state of modern Android development than a year ago, and a good chunk of that happiness didn’t actually come until after I pulled Guice in as a dependency.  Shame that didn’t get built into a core part of the API, IMO, but I’m happy now.

I wanted to call this Weathr; that’s certainly the obvious thing.  Weathrman is just a bit too long for my taste.  But someone else appears to have had a similar idea, albeit for the web… it looks dead, but there’s no point risking it, and this does just as good a job.

I’m tracking exceptions and stuff to Analytics; I reeeeally wish there was a built-in exception logging API that pushed stack traces and bug reports back up to the marketplace.  Still, I’m looking forward to seeing how this works in the wild, and whether or not it’s an utterly broken experience in cities less populated than London.  I do my best to find local photos, but it will eventually do global searches…

I remain concerned over a few things.  I’d like to find some way to re-set myself as the active wallpaper if I’m the active live wallpaper and I update the binary.  If you know how to do that, ping me.  I hate the fact that every time I update this thing I have to go back to setting it as the current wallpaper again.

And I really ought to test this on a phone that isn’t a Nexus One.  Should you try this app on something other than an N1, do tell me what the experience was like.  Some things, methinks, won’t make sense - I should probably be more careful than I am, for example, about which image size I choose for download, rather than always assuming that bigger is better.

I look forward to hearing from you.