How do I know?

Well, the GA tracking that’s included in PackRat reports the Android version PackRat is run on — and little else, I might add. That’s been incredibly useful in figuring out, for example, that I can drop support for Android 1.5 and include support for the Quick Search Box.

And now this tracking shows up an Android version 1.6-GalaxoV1.2 which a quick Google search suggests is for the Samsung Galaxy. You Galaxy owners may think that’s old news, but it’s new to me!

In related news … and this is really more exciting to me, personally … apparently there are one or two people out there running Android 3.1.

Yes. Three dot one. Exciting things are to come, I’m sure!

Edit: Seems like this is old news after all. Hello then, first Galaxy user that updated!

Thanks to PackRat’s awesome users, I can fix bugs even when I don’t find time for major development work. One such user sent in crash log, which shows that PackRat crashes on certain book searches.

The bug is actually quite embarrassing — enough so that I should explain it a little. See, Google Base allows one to specify the number of pages a book has, but does not require it. Apparently in all my tests, I only searched and found books where the number of pages is not specified.

The crash is due to a silly typo when pages are specified. Ugh. Well, I’m glad that with the help of you guys I can figure out things like that!

One of PackRat’s users, Sean Glass, was nice enough to provide me with a crash log that let me analyze a crash he was experiencing — and by the reviews I read, he was not the only one. It turns out that some of the people publishing data in Google Base enter URLs for images that are just valid enough to be parsed as URLs, but just break the downloading code. That’s just one of those bugs that are easy to fix but hard to find if you don’t search for the right stuff. So thank you Sean for helping me find this!

Also in this release are Chinese translations, provided by the nice people behind this website, where PackRat should be available soon.

Update: PackRat is now available from 91.com as well.

Disappointingly, the christmas release I was hoping to finish was not to be. It’s going to sound like a lame excuse at this point, but other things kept interrupting.

But fear not, I’ve made a bit of progress with the next release nonetheless. At this point I’m not entirely sure when it’ll be done exactly, but expect an update early next year!

Unfortunately, the fix requires me to drop support for Android 1.5. I’m sorry! This is a side project, and I don’t really have the time/resources to support every Android version out there.

But for you Android 1.6+ users, that means that I can also include support for the Quick Search Box, which allows you to search for media in your collection right from the desktop’s search bar.

In order to benefit from that, you’ll need to head to your phone’s Settings > Search > Searchable items, and check “PackRat Search” in that list.

Head over to the downloads page for a link to this release.

There should be another release fairly soon, with some features added that I haven’t had time to complete yet. Who knows, it might turn into a small christmas present from me to you!

Here are a few ways you can help me if you’re affected, though:

1. First, please make sure you’re not suffering from the Droid autofocus bug. The best way to make sure that’s not the case is to download ZXing Barcode Scanner, and see whether you can read barcodes with that. The scanning code is the same in both apps. If you can’t scan barcodes with this app, it’s not PackRat’s fault, and I can’t help you.
2. If you see crashes/”force close” scenarios when you try to scan, you can help me by sending me log files from your phone. This applies to any crashes with PackRat, not just scanning related ones. The easiest way to do so is to download Log Collector. First, do whatever it takes to make the crash happen. Then, start Log Collector and send the log to my email address jens AT finkhaeuser DOT de.
3. Finally, if you’re a Droid user, not afraid of installing apps manually (i.e. not through Android Market) and willing to help, I could send you an updated version of PackRat to try out. With a bit of luck, that’ll resolve the issue.

Thank you for your help!

Update 2009-12-07: I think this is now solved. Expect a new release soon. Many thanks to Domenic Padula and John L. Galt for their help!

The bad news is that that doesn’t help right away, of course. But there are some things we can do in the community.

In the meantime, I contacted Dr. Friedger Mueffke from OpenIntents.org. He’d like to promote the Intent registry already there to create something of a place to create, discuss and discover standards for Intents¹. To achieve that, the registry will likely be extended:

1. Entries in the registry will receive a status, e.g. “draft” or “standard”. The idea is to give the community an opportunity to influence the design before elevating anything to the height of a standard.
2. You will be able to comment on entries in the registry as a way to guide discussions about the design.

The bigger question, though, at which point a draft has been sufficiently reviewed and tweaked to be called a standard remains to be clarified; if there are any suggestions, I’d welcome them. Some kind of voting system, perhaps? We’ll need a standardizing process, but as far as I am concerned it can be as lightweight as a vote.

The whole idea of a centralized Intent registry won’t really work unless developers support it. It would be very useful if developers publicly announced their support of these standards. If there’s a graphics artist out there willing to whip up a badge we can plaster all over the web, that’d be great.

Ideas? Suggestions?

Edit: I just closed comments on this blog post. Suggestions should ideally be submitted in the newly formed Android Standards discussion group.

Edit #2: It didn’t take long until someone pointed me to the OpenIntents group. That is of course the already established place for such discussions, so “Android Standards” is closed as of now.

1. This isn’t really limited to Intents; OI also collects information about URI schemes and Extras, both of which have similar importance.

If you’re technically inclined, head over to that blog for the nitty-gritty of things. It’s pretty well done — and obviously not the part that annoys me.

What bothers me is that despite having come up with such a great mechanism for code re-use, Google have missed two vital bits to make the whole thing useful:

1. There are no standards for Intents.
2. You cannot model dependencies on Intents.

Let’s take PackRat as an example: it re-uses code from the fantastic Zebra Crossing project in order to let you scan barcodes of your favorite media items. Yet it reuses them in a primitive fashion without using Google’s Intent mechanism. Rather, code is duplicated between the two projects.

The reason for that is simply user comfort — that is, yours. While it’s entirely possible to rearrange PackRat’s code to use the Barcode Scanner app from the ZXing project for scanning instead — via Intents — the simple fact is that you’d need to install both in order for PackRat to unfold it’s full potential.

Unfortunately I cannot mark PackRat to be dependent on the Barcode Scanner app in such a way that you’d automatically install one if you also install the other.

Which is fine, if you’re an Android geek. It’s not fine if you’re my mum. While she wouldn’t necessarily find any use for PackRat, the sentiment that she should be able to use it if she wanted to remains valid. Why place a higher burden on users than strictly necessary?

Modeling dependencies between software packages is essential if you want code re-use and user comfort. Google seems to have missed out on that opportunity so far.

In PackRat’s feedback forum, someone fairly empathically argued that I reuse Barcode Scanner anyway — and I even agree with the principle of it. One of the things they argued for, though, was that by decoupling PackRat from the actual scanner app used, people could pick their favourite app for that task.

Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Any Intent for scanning I might use would certainly be understood by ZXing’s Barcode Scanner, but not by any other. That’s because ZXing came up with the Intent and parameters to use by themselves. While they may have documented their approach fairly well, there is no guarantee that any other developer would provide a compatible app.

Standards are never guarantees for that, granted. But at least they provide some form of pressure for developers to either conform or publicly document a competing, potentially better standard. Right now, in the Android developer community, there is neither.

Android needs standards for Intents, and similar means for apps to interact. OpenIntents.org makes a passable attempt at documenting what apps do and expect out there, but that’s not the same as Google endorsing them as standards — not by a far cry.

So Google’s blog entry annoys me. On the one hand, they’d like to encourage us to re-use code, and have even provided a clever approach to facilitate that. On the other hand, their support falls woefully short of enabling developers to provide true integration.

In the end, the decision to duplicate code rather than re-use it more elegantly was clear: user experience comes first. And for the time being, that’s better achieved by more primitive means.

Before you get too excited, there aren’t any major new features in this release. It also does not fix any bugs¹.

The reason for this new release is simply that a lot of you have given me suggestions in any form imaginable but via the suggestions forum.

Now any and all feedback is much appreciated, and I will continue to add suggestions you make to the forum. But in order to give you a better overview of what’s planned — and in what stage of development each feature is — I’ve decided to integrate the forum better into the app.

Integration is far from perfect, but at least you’ll get to see the current list of suggestions at the click of a button or two.

I’m looking forward to future suggestions from you. Thank you for using PackRat!

1. I don’t know of any in v1.0.2

While ADC2 didn’t quite end as I’d hoped, all of you wonderful people who voted PackRat into the top 25% of entrants deserve to use it on a daily basis¹. Thank you very much for your votes!

So I pushed out a release as fast as I could — this release does not contain any new features over what I submitted to ADC2, but does contain a few usability tweaks. Nothing major, but this new version’s user interface should be a bit more responsive, amongst other things.

You can download the app by just scanning or clicking on the QR code below.

PackRat on Android Market

1. Assuming that’s a good thing, and not punishment.