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

[Alexis ROBERT <alexis.robert@gmail.com>]

... and a last thing : when you launch the application you will have a
menu and you may think that the buttons are not active. In fact the
buttons are active, they just are like the menu of the
Facebook/Google+ app without the icons :) By the way, only the "Date"
entry works.

On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Alexis ROBERT <alexis.robert@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've begun the actual programming of the Android application and it
> should now be able to do time scale conversions.
>
> 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 ?)
>
> 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
>