If you’re a happy Nexus One owner and are eagerly awaiting the latest Android version 2.2 (aka FroYo) to magically appear on your phone, wait no more! A few days ago I forced my N1 to upgrade, and I’ve written up instructions on how to do that here.
It worked like a charm for me. Of course, the usual health warnings apply, and remember to make backups of everything you really need.
This release is mostly thanks to Mark Sunderland, who thankfully pointed out to me that PackRat’s lending feature does not work on HTC Hero phones that were upgraded to Android 2.1-update1. That’s now fixed — and kudos to Mark for helping me circumvent that bug in HTC’s upgrade!
Other than that, I managed to solve a rare and vexing issue where items you scanned or searched for might be added to the database without you selecting to do so. This fix does not remove those items, though — it just prevents the same from happening again. If you want to remove these items, long-press on them in the shelf and select the delete option.
Next, on Android 2.1 and 2.2 the search might crash when searching within PackRat via the hardware search button.
Lastly, this release tweaked to work on Android 2.2.
Enjoy!
It’s been a busy few weeks since the last release, and that prevented me from pushing updates recently. But I’m glad to say that nothing terribly bad seems to have happened since then.
This release fixes one fairly strange issue: if you added an item to the loan list, then from there to the wishlist, and then removed it from the wishlist again, it would not be back on the loan list, but it would still have a due date and loanee contact set. The due date and loanee are now cleared if an item is moved to the wishlist — after all, how can you lend something you don’t yet have?
Other than that, a few rarer crashes have been fixed.
Time to spread some happiness!
Happy User
Above you can see Timo, a happy PackRat user. If you, too, wish to be a happy PackRat user, why not go to the packrat store and purchase some happiness-inducing products?
You’ll spread your happiness to Sander, who made the PackRat logo you’ll be wearing/drinking from, and to myself. Doesn’t that just make you feel wam and fuzzy inside?
I receive a decent amount of emails from you guys out there, detailing what you think PackRat is good or bad at, telling me about crashes, etc. Today I received an email from a user that first astounded me, then angered me because I found it offensive, but that I then realized really requires answers. It concerns your privacy, and pretty much asks the question what sort of data PackRat tracks, and what other hidden behaviour it has.
Now a lot of that I’ve covered in a previous post about privacy. I won’t repeat it again save to say that under some error conditions, PackRat sends just enough information to tracking servers for me to figure out what the problem was and fix it.
But that previous article skips over the fact that PackRat tracks some information under normal operating conditions. Let me explain what that is and why.
Another week or so passed, another bug fix update. I’m getting into a rhythm here, hope I can keep this up. The good news is that the overall number of bugs is dwindling. The bad news is that as some bugs get fixed, the route gets cleared for you to encounter others.
This week’s batch of bugs was the usual mixed bag of force closes and minor annoyances. But I’m glad to say that the minor annoyances seem to outnumber the force closes by now.
Here’s what’s really weird, though: about two thirds of the errors reported occurred on the HTC Droid Eris. That’s quite a big number. So either that phone is selling like hot cakes, outselling the Motorola Droid — but that doesn’t seem entirely likely.
Or, and that’s a more reasonable assumption, the Eris is particularly prone to producing errors. Now for that second theory, I can come up with two possible explanations again:
While there’s absolutely a chance that it’s the latter, the specs don’t really show the Eris to be all that different from other current HTC phones. Hmm. If I were a betting man, I think I’d bet on the first being the reason. And that means, I’d stay away from the Eris for now.
Anyway, hope you enjoy this release!
I figured I should post a big thank-you. So here it is:
You’re really making me happy. And because pictures are better at explaining some things, here’s a picture to explain why you deserve this.
PackRat Users
Click on the image for a full sized version.
This release fixes a number of lesser bugs and one major one that seems to have escaped me and other people who reported issues. Switchbreak had a keener eye, and spotted that all of a sudden, smart shelves were editable — but once you saved your changes, they’d convert into regular shelves.
The biggest change this version introduces, therefore, is to re-add smart shelves as they were intended.
The second biggest change is that this version drops Chinese localization. That makes me very sad indeed — but since pushing 1.2.0 out, I’ve not really received any help with that, and unfortunately can’t really translate to Chinese myself. So I figure that no Chinese is better than broken Chinese.
Incidentally, not that it’ll mean much to most of you, but this release also coincides with source code revision number 1200. That should make it extra special.
Edit: Got the name of the user who found the bug confused with that of another guy contacting me about PackRat. That’s fixed now — apologies!
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: PackRat’s users are awesome!
In my rage to squash bugs in yesterdays 1.2.1 release, I managed to introduce a new one, and didn’t see it before pushing the build to the Market. It’s a fairly obvious one, even: you can’t add items from any of the options on a shelf page.
Tim Onken kindly pointed this bug out to me. Its literally less than a line to fix, an oversight, almost as simple as a typo, so a new version 1.2.2 is in the Market now. It should hit your phones very soon.
Sorry for this oversight — that’s why you need a good quality assurance team, incidentally. As a developer, you can easily get blind to these things. So kudos to all those underappreciated QA guys out there, and kudos to PackRat’s users again for being so helpful!
I didn’t want to wait. Since I pushed 1.2.0, my crash log database has been filling up more and more, and that had to be changed. It’s kind of irrational, given that most of the bugs existed in PackRat for months and nobody bothered to report them, but hey, bugs still bother me.
There’s nothing really new in 1.2.1, just bugfixes.
