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Photo Cube Version 3.2 now available!

Friday, July 15, 2016

New Version 3.7.2 of CliMate Animated Weather Widget released

The new version 3.7.2 was released today.

This fixes the Current Location issue on some devices, by allowing Google Play Services to be used to get the location. There is a new Use Google Play Services checkbox in the Set Location settings screen.

This will be automatically ticked for Android 6.0+ devices, but you can change that at any time. If its not ticked, it uses the old method of getting the location, which is fine for the vast majority of devices.  Just tick the box if you are having trouble getting the location.



Now I will go back to the Pirate Theme, and see if I can speed that up.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Current Location problems..

Had several reports that CliMate Animated Weather Widget's current location setting is no longer working on Android 6.0 devices.

This is really strange, as it works on some devices, but not all. It works perfectly on my friend's S7 Edge, for example, but not on S7's for several customers who contacted me.

It looks like the current CliMate method of getting the location using Android's LocationManager is just no longer reliable on the latest devices running 6.0, even though it should be.

So the newer recommended method using Google Play Services is the way to go. A few users having problems have helped me out by running some tester apps that successfully get the location using Google Play Services.

At the same time I am moving the development environment from Eclipse to Android Studio, so I can take advantage of the easier way of integrating such newer services. This is not trivial, and has given me a lot of headaches but is the way forward.

The new theme such as Townhouse and the forthcoming Pirate theme are pretty slow to start up, because they are using so many layers of views to display the various animations. Using Android Studio, I can start to use some new features such as PercentageLayouts, which will drastically reduce the number of layers I need to show such complex animations.

So the next steps:

  • Convert CliMate to run under Android Studio
  • Add the new Google Play Services to get the current location
  • Test and the publish the update so customers having issues get the fix
Then:

  • Use PercentageLayout on the partially completed Pirate Theme
  • Finish the Pirate Theme
  • Publish an update
  • Change the Townhouse and other themes to use PercentageLayout.