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BB10 Work Log: December 29, 2012December 30, 2012
Yesterday I had a great dev day.
I started by finishing off Flix for BB10. At least, I hope so. I cheated by continuing to use version 2.1 of the SDK. (crossing my fingers it doesn't get rejected because of that) One remaining glitch was that the audio/video synchronization was off, but my theory about what was causing it was right: The number of bytes of audio per millisecond on the PlayBook always seems to be 176 instead of varying like one would think with the quality of the audio stream. But on BB10, it does seem to vary. I also re-Photoshop'd all of the graphics to fit the resolution of BB10. With that done, I submitted the app.
Next, I spent just over an hour porting Print to BB10, and that went pretty smoothly.
With that ported, it only took 20 minutes to port Send To PC.
Finally, late in the evening, I started porting Picasa Sync, and 2 hours later that was done. The main annoyance there was this label issue with the .textWidth property not giving accurate values back. I finally worked around it by removing the old label from the stage each time I need to update its text, creating a new label, waiting for the added event, and then querying the .textWidth property. I'll have to go back and update iTunes Sync / Print / Send to PC to use this same logic.
So as of now I have the following apps submitted:
  | iTunes Sync |
| Flix + Flix Movie Selector |
| Print |
| Send To PC |
| Picasa Sync |
Time log:
Flix: 1 hour 37 min
Print: 1 hour 15 min
Send To PC: 22 min
Picasa Sync: 2 hours 13 min
Total: 5 hours 29 min
BB10 Work Log: December 28 2012December 28, 2012
Today I figured I'd tweak, test, and submit Flix to App World for BB10. I had spent a couple hours on Flix a month or so ago, with the hope that I could combine the Flix Movie Selector app with the main Flix app (via the WebView control), but getting the Foreign Window sample app to work in conjunction with my screen code just wasn't working for some reason. Given that roadblock, I figured I should at least submit it as is.
I spent 20 minutes making required changes to
Flix Movie Selector, but upon launch the app would just immediately close after displaying the standard BB10 spash screen for an instant. (AIR app) Boo. Of course, after spending nearly an hour going over every detail with a fine tooth comb, I couldn't figure out what was going on. In the end I had to take a "Hello World" BB10 AIR app and re-build the app by copying and pasting over functionality, and finally, that's working. (1.5 hours of time)
Next I moved onto Flix itself. When the dev alpha was first released, Flix worked like a charm. I tried building and deploying it today with the latest SDK, and no such luck. First of all, user prompts weren't showing up. I found some information on the forums and fixed that. Next, I needed to prevent portrait orientation.
But with those things fixed, the actual playback wasn't working at all. It buffers for 30 seconds or so, and then the audio starts playing with some choppiness, and video frames aren't showing at all. Bleh.
The strange thing here is that when the Dev Alpha was first released, I tried Flix on the device and it worked fine. So what gives? I went back and tried the code with the PlayBook 2.1 SDK and it worked fine. Then I noticed that you can deploy NDK apps built with the PlayBook 2.1 SDK to the Dev Alpha, and if you do that, again, the app works. It even uses the proper BB10 dialogs, etc. It makes me wonder whether I might be allowed to submit the BB10 app compiled using the 2.1 SDK.
Flix Movie Selector:
Changes required for BB10: 20 min
Troubleshooting bizarre app crash on load: 1 hour 10 min
Total: 1.5 hours
Flix:
Fix user prompts: 10 min
Prevent portrait orientation: 10 min
Troubleshoot why playback is broken: 40 min (unsuccessful)
Troubleshoot using 2.1 tablet SDK: 1 hour
Total: 2 hours
Total: 3.5 hours
PlayBook Work Log: December 16 2012December 16, 2012
Well it has been a long time since I've done any PlayBook development. Life just hasn't afforded it recently, and any time I've had has gone to BB10 stuff.
But I wanted to make a quick little enhancement to my Alarm Clock app so that it would support a visual alarm for Eli, our 3 year old.
We're going to try having him use the PB as his alarm clock, and have the background image change when it's time for him to get up.
It took 20 minutes to make the code changes, but it looks like I don't actually have the PB SDK set up on my new computer. I downloaded 2.1 and tried to install, but during installation the installer freezes, with the window showing nothing but black. Groan. Why must computers be such a bear? After 20 minutes I finally got the installer to work by choosing the installation directory on my C:\ driver rather than my E:\ drive.
Initial implementation: 20 min
SDK installer troubleshooting: 20 min
Testing and bug fixes: 35 min
- Bug 1: Part of my implementation logic didn't make sense.
- Bug 2: Alarm type was getting reset once app was exited and started again due to a subtle bit of logic that took 20 minutes to discover.
Total: 75 min
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