Thursday 10 March 2011

Ooops

I released version 1.7.4 of Meditation Helper tonight, and was very happy with myself that I had fixed the last couple of lingering bugs. Imagine my horror when I found errors being reported, with comments like:
latest updates has messed up my samsung galaxy a keep getting errors and my favorite app does not open
Meditation Helper..don't work !
The problem was that with this release I introduced Proguard for the first time. The reason for this was that I also introduced Jodatime to help solve some problems with time zone handling. Proguard helps to shrink down the size of the application to the minimum required.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, because Proguard had changed package names, a call to getResourceAsStream() failed because the directory it was looking had been renamed. That caused a NullPointerException, which caused a force close.

Ooops.

The thing is, I'd been running the new version on my phone for the last couple of days, and it was all working fine. But I hadn't been running the signed version. And Proguard only runs when you export a signed version. In other words, I wasn't running the version of the app that I uploaded to the market.

Ooops.

Apparently it's possible to add some configuration to Proguard to handle looking up resources. But, since I wanted to get a fix out as quickly as possible. I simply removed the offending class. It provided functionality that I'd considered removing a few months ago anyway, so it was no great loss.

I can only apologize to the people that were affected by this. Hope I didn't cause you too much trauma! I have updated my release process - from now on I will always run the signed version of the application on my own phone before uploading it to the market.

4 comments:

  1. Thanx for your work - your meditation timer is really good.

    But recently i have been getting problems concerning saving my setting. Every time I have to reactivate my phone option in your app, cause it doesn't save my choices from last time.

    Any solution?
    Thanx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, sorry for taking so long to respond. Can you explain a bit more what you mean? I don't have any problems with the settings.

    What option is it you are trying to set that isn't working?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Totally unrelated to this post (sorry couldn't figure how else to contact you), but will you ever consider writing the app for iphone? I switched from android but miss this app dearly!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Sara - sorry, I won't be writing an iPhone version. I switched from iPhone to Android because I disagree with Apple's policy of suing people using ridiculous patents. I will never (never say never, eh?) write an iPhone app.

    ReplyDelete

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