Re: [Orekit Developers] [SOCIS 2011] Status of the Android application

[Andreas Rieger <ar@quinput.net>]

Hello,

It seems the apk was not signed.
If you do this with a tool like this:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=695701

it worked on my emulator.

Is the full source-code already somewhere present? I would like to experiment to
add some features which are more relevant for my type of work and would not fit in
the SOCIS context.

Regards
 Andreas Rieger

On 07.08.2011 13:44, MAISONOBE Luc wrote:
> Alexis ROBERT <alexis.robert@gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
>> Hi,
> 
> Hello Alexis,
> 
>>
>> I've begun the actual programming of the Android application and it
>> should now be able to do time scale conversions.
> 
> You're fast!
> 
>>
>> If you want to test, there is a snapshot apk here :
>> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6734910/orekit/orekit-20110806.apk (btw, do
>> you want me to use the forge to publish snapshots ?)
> 
> Yes, it would help preserving them for later reference in a controlled location.
> There is a tab for this on the forge (named "fichiers" in the French configured 
> interface).
> 
> I have tried to install the apk on my tablet (it's a Malata Zpad, very similar to
> viewsonic G-tablet, running VEGan-TAB 7.0.0-RC1-Harmony rom on Android 2.3.3). It
> failed to install with a single message "application non installée". I don't known
> where to find further informations about the reason for this failure. I have
> already set up the tablet to accept installing applications that do not come from
> Android market, so it is probably not the reason. I tried the installation
> directly using a file explorer after having put the .apk in the sdcard, and
> choosing "install" when prompted for.
> 
> I'll look at the rest of your message later on (perhaps this evening, but I can't
> promise).
> 
> You have done a pretty good work, congratulations.
> Luc
> 
>>
>> As there is only basic support for datasets (and by basic, I mean
>> *very* basic, like System.setProperty("orekit.data.path", "/sdcard/");
>> ) for the moment, you'll need to drop orekit-data.zip on the root of
>> your sdcard so that this application doesn't crash.
>>
>> Just some random notes :
>>
>> * If you select a time scale or if you select a date for the first
>> time, you might notice that it takes some seconds where the UI is not
>> responsive. That's because Orekit is loading the dataset in the UI
>> thread. After this, it should be in cache and it would run faster. In
>> the future I might move calls which require reading from a dataset for
>> the first time in a separate thread with a progress dialog but ...
>> that would be in the future :)
>>
>> * By the way if you select GMST time scale it crashes and I don't
>> currently understand why (also I didn't try to figure out why it
>> crashes).
>>
>> * There is a class in the source code named SelectorActivity. Its
>> purpose is to make programming parameters panels easier by acting like
>> a list of views (a View in Android is like a Widget in Qt or others).
>>
>> I'm still very skeptic about its "hack" or "not hack" status, because
>> it has nearly the same status as all the PreferenceActivity stuff of
>> the Android SDK except that it doesn't seem to achieve the same
>> usecases. PreferenceActivity seems to better address cases where an
>> user wants to "set preferences" and go back and we're ok. Here we have
>> a more low-level approach where we sometimes need a list of elements,
>> and one should be able to trigger a specific return value (like a list
>> of time scales for instance) where as one other can (for instance)
>> launch an other activity for selecting recently used locations, or we
>> can want to have a list of radio buttons with a "Ok" button to
>> validate at the bottom, etc... You can even put a webkit view inside a
>> list item :) If you try the application, both date selector and time
>> scale selector could be made using SelectorActivity even if they seem
>> to have a different behaviors (except that I didn't use it for
>> selecting time scales because it was very simple to do it with a plain
>> ListActivity and it would result in a lighter code as SelectorActivity
>> itselfs uses ListActivity).
>>
>> I don't know if I've made myself very clear, but it seems to me that
>> we have some usecases that would not match the Preferences API which
>> seems to be at a very higher level. There is maybe a way to do this
>> using official Preference API but I didn't figure how -- I checked in
>> the Android git repository and I didn't see such usecases to check how
>> they use the Preferences API in the Settings app but I didn't see
>> usecases like we could have -- so I continued with my
>> SelectorActivity.
>>
>> * Also the OrekitActivity is only here to add some utility function so
>> that window can easily add an Actionbar. By the way, an actionbar is
>> the Android way to say a toolbar. If you want to add an actionbar,
>> just create an activity which extends OrekitActivity, put <include
>> layout="@layout/actionbar"/> in the layout, and you can do
>> addActionbarButton(), setActionbarText(), etc... :)
>>
>> * There is also a DoubleDialog which is a wrapper around AlertDialog
>> to ask for a double value. It will also check if the user has put a
>> double value when he clicks on "Ok" and if the user didn't put a valid
>> double value, you get an error message. You must read the
>> documentation of DoubleDialog to use it because I only wrapped one
>> "setButton" method for the validation part so if you ignore that, it
>> will use standard AlertDialog methods and your code can crash.
>>
>> * The "dashboard" (which is the menu when you launch the Android app),
>> is currently pretty hideous but that's because I didn't take the time
>> to draw some icons for the tasks (even if I don't think it would be
>> nicer with my icons :D ). Also I suspect the DashboardView to have a
>> bug when you remove the application title bar.
>>
>> * I've re-used some code available on the Google I/O 2011 Android app
>> (mostly the DashboardView, some ideas for the actionbar, and some
>> drawables for the actionbar (actionbar_background_9.png,
>> actionbar_separator_9.png, actionbar_button.xml, btn_bg_pressed.9.png
>> and btn_bg_selected.9.png) ) and some code used in the Android
>> platform (just layout/selector_item.xml iirc), which are published
>> under the Apache 2.0 license. I took care to put all the original
>> copyrights info in all the files I re-used, and to drop a note in
>> NOTICE.txt. I hope that's ok for you.
>>
>> If it's ok, I'll do the frame conversion part tomorrow, orbit
>> conversion should follow.
>>
>> If you have any ideas or comments, just let me know :)
>>
>> Have a nice day,
>>
>> Alexis
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
> 
>