Electrist 0.60b1 released

Electrist 0.60b1
Electrist 0.60b1

I’d like to assure everyone that development will be ongoing. For a full explanation of the slow updates please see my previous post.

0.60b1 [Feb 26, 2011]
+ added ACRA crash reporting library (requires INTERNET and READ_LOGS permissions)
+ added modular help dialogs that pull help text from RedBinary.com so that it can be changed to reflect FAQ without requiring an update to the app
+ general code housekeeping and refactoring

More information on the ACRA (Application Crash Report for Android) library can be found at its Google code pages. The reason I have included it into Electrist is because it is awesome. Not only does it include a tidy interface to the user when the app crashes, but it allows the developer to choose one of several ways to interface with the resultant data. The way it is currently configured in Electrist sends a stacktrace and logcat to a Google Docs spreadsheet. This is the same data that I look at when debugging the app on my development computer. The crash reporting built in to Android is pretty hit-or-miss. You may notice that it is only very rarely that you get the “send bug report” dialog when an app crashes. Even when this does happen it only forwards the stacktrace to an awkward place in the developer’s console in the Android Market and does not send a notification of any kind to the developer that this has occurred.

Help: Resistors
Help: Resistors

Another change in this update is the way that the help dialogs work. They are now ‘WebView’ widgets that pull their content from a directory here on RedBinary.com. This is not only so that they can more easily be nicely formatted. The biggest reason is so that I can maintain them separately from the app codebase.

Both of these changes, along with some other interior structure work, help set the stage going forward. Updates may still be slow for a little while longer, but I will absolutely do my best to include at least one new calculator from the disabled list in each update from here on out.

I really do appreciate everyone’s patience with this. I hope you’ve read the post linked above and I hope you accept my reasoning as well as my humble apologies.