Tughi

At last, the application has been translated to Romanian. :-)
The currencies have translations for German and French too, but I still need to ask my friends for help with the rest of the application.

Other notable changes to the application:

• updated the tabs to look better on Gingerbread
• fixed application crash when the user clicked the history while still loading

These days I had some free time to work on my hobby application again.

Thanks to the new error reporting feature in the Android Market, I got the chance to fix 3 bugs. Although the error console doesn't give as much information I would like to have about the devices on which the error occurred it is still a very welcomed feature. Thanks Google!

Besides bug fixes, I decided to reenable the landscape mode for the currencies lists and converter. This should be a good thing especially for the users that are interested in acquiring a device like Acer beTouch E130.

Under the hood now the application makes use now of compression for loading the rates from the server to minimize the time the radio is used. This is a hint I learned from the Google IO Android sessions that should improve battery life.

For the next release I'm thinking on adding some translations. Currently only English is supported, but I'm planning to add Romanian and German. I also accept other language suggestions.

That's all for now.

While using the converter I found out that having the favorites on top of the currencies picker improves the usability.

The widgets got some attention too:

• new look
• values for HUF, JPY and KRW are now divided by 100

This version changes the way the users get notified about application updates.
From now on, if a new version is available, the user will be presented with a notification in the status bar. If this is too noisy, it can be deactivated from within the application preferences.

The decision was made based on the poor update rate from the last release which fixed a severe bug.
There are two other reasons:

• there are many users that use very old versions
• I met some users that don't know how to update the application

The application has now a little over 1000 active users!
Thanks guys!

This version fixes a very severe bug that made the application use a lot of CPU even if the user didn't use it.


For the developers interested in how I found it:

The Battery use tool from Android 1.6 reported my application as having the CPU total around 13 minutes, which is a huge amount for an application that usually does only one update over a day, and that update is done in under one seconds.
First thing I did was to inspect the logcat. After staring at my process, for a very long while, I noticed that the GC was invoked every 4 minutes and reported collecting 13k objects. That was odd.
Next thing, I fired the DDMS tool and used the Allocation Tracker to collect data for one minute. It turned out the I had a message dispatcher that was not stopped after the activity was paused. Bam!


Thanks DDMS, you saved important battery life! :-)

This version fixes a bug that made the application update the rates two times in case of manual refresh or in case of device reboot.

Besides the bugfix there's also a small enhancement. The application now listens to connectivity changes only if an update failed because there was no connectivity. This feature was introduced to improve the battery life, since less executed tasks means longer battery life.

The update is available on the Market.

After I read the comments where the users complained about the missing values in the new history activity, I had no other choice but to add them back.
So this new version is about the history values:

• use the touchscreen, the DPAD or the trackball to walk through the history values
• min and max values are now placed at the bottom of the screen
• mean (average) and median values are also visible for the users that need them

Go and grab it from the Market using this link.

After almost 4 months, a new update is available on the market (install link).
The new version has a brand new user interface with a bunch of new features:

• tabbed interface
• detailed currency names
• favorite currencies
• redesigned history activity
• redesigned converter activity
• configurable default actions for lists and widgets

The product page was updated too.

This time I asked a friend to help me with the user interface and the website. Without his help these wouldn't have looked this good. Thanks Mr. Designer! ;-)

A new update is available on the market (install link).
This version comes with:

• support for different screen resolutions (Donut)
• removed error notifications caused by a missing internet connection
• history caching

Initially I thought I would be the only user for this application. It turns out that I was wrong. And because of this I just had to improve it.

Some of the highlights of this new version:

• enhanced client-server transport
• first-time-use downloads the currency list faster
• the update is always done in the background
• history activity with progress monitor
• new feature: currency converter based on the current values

If you are interested in the RON currency give it a try: install link

My first free application: RON Exchange Rates