Sunday, October 27, 2013

BruinLyfe 1.2.0 - Tutorial added, better screen support


BruinLyfe 1.2.0 has been pushed out to Google Play today.  It brings better support for 7in+ screens and it also brings a first-run tutorial.  There have been plenty of changes over the past 12 hours!  Other updates include improved algorithms for detecting which dining halls are currently open, optimizing JSON parsing code and removing depreciated API calls.

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to download BruinLyfe here!

You can check out the source code here.

Chris Konstad

Recent Developments: College Life and Bruin Lyfe


I haven't really had time to post recently because of college.  I moved in and I have been kept busy with my classes.  After getting here, I found out that someone developed an iOS app called Bruin Life, which had dining hall menus among other information.  Sadly, he never ported it to Android, so a floormate and I decided to fix the situation ourselves.  Over the past few weeks, he and I been developing our own app and it's coming along great!  You can see in the screenshots above that it lists all of the dining hall hours.  When the  user clicks on a time (i.e. De Neve lunch), it opens up another activity that lists the menu for that time period.  More updates will be coming, so stay tuned!


Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Friday, September 6, 2013

The Future of Mobile Development

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend the Qt Insights meeting in Palo Alto, CA.  I met with some other Qt developers and we discussed the findings of the Qt Insights project.  For the first time, a clear picture of the Qt community is coming together.  Through Qt Insights' report, we can see who is using Qt and which industries it's being used in.  The report shows that Qt is gaining new developers and that, overall, people are happy with Qt.  While at the Qt Insights meeting, the question of Qt's ability to target multiple mobile OSes came up.  One tangent that we didn't have the time to fully discuss was: how can Qt apps fit into their target platform (UX-wise) if they are written once and deployed everywhere?  To help answer that question, I wrote the following blog post.

The Future of Mobile Development

What I see as the future of mobile development is a unified native API that spans across OSes and systems from various manufacturers.  Want to write an app?  Great!  Learn one language with one API and you can deploy your app to Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish, etc.  The problem is, how do we get there from here?  It is no easy task to create such a language or such an API.  Thankfully, the language already exists, and it is well known.  Have you heard of C++?  Yeah, that language that works across all of those platforms (and many more!) already?  Well, C++ is already gaining popularity after the whole "managed languages rule!" trend of the past decade.  "But Chris," you might ask, "what about the unified API?"  Well, that's coming from everybody's favorite C++ framework: Qt.

The Current Status of Cross Platform Mobile Development

People are already partially working in that cross platform development utopia in which one language and one API let you deploy to every mobile OS.  Many games and other apps have a C++ back-end wrapped in the platform's SDK language (Java for Android, Obj-C for iOS, etc.).  That wrapper creates the UI and let's the C++ core access other platform APIs.  The only problem is that the developer MUST learn the SDK languages and APIs for each platform they want to deploy to.  While that may be alright for big time developers, for hobbyists and self-taught programmers that can be a major roadblock in deploying apps across multiple OSes.  We need a single API that we can use across all systems; a cross-platform language isn't enough by itself.

Problems with the Future

Each mobile OS has a very different UX that must be catered to by the developers because of user demand.  Android users absolutely hate it when the Android app uses the UI of the iOS version of an application.  It makes the Android version feel cheap and like an afterthought.  The mismatched theme devalues the application and it tells the users that the company doesn't care enough about them to rewrite the UI for Android.  There can be other issues, too.  For example, in iOS, application settings are often handled in the system preferences app.  However, on Android, each application usually has it's own settings fragment within the application.  What I'm getting at here is that even with the future of mobile development (one language, one API), developers cannot simply write an app once and deploy it across every OS available because the UX wouldn't be native for each platform, even if the on-screen UI elements are.

How to Remedy the Problems

The solution to the problem is quite simple, really.  Write a new UI for each target platform!  I mean, developers already do that when they have the C++ core and SDK language/API wrapper, right?  Only with a cross platform language and API, the developer can reuse more UI code, simplifying the process while retaining a native-feeling UX.  Think about it.  Even though the developer would have to tweak the UI/UX for each target platform, they could do so using the same set of tools and knowledge!  On Android, this would mean the developer wouldn't have to know about the JNI or Java to make a native feeling Android application.  On iOS, this would mean that the developer wouldn't have to know about Obj-C.  All the developer would have to do is move around a few UI elements and select the target's theme.


TLDR: Qt 5.2, which introduces iOS support, marks the beginning of a decent cross-platform develop suite for mobile apps.  Yes, the UI/UX will have to be tweaked for each target, but it can be done using one set of tools and the same knowledge.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Monday, August 26, 2013

Monterey 3.0 Crash on Windows

Just a quick warning that Monterey 3.0 is crashing on some Windows systems (win7 32bit AND 64bit) with a VC++ runtime error, which is weird because I compiled it with Mingw32 and I get no errors on my system.  I can, however, reproduce the error on another machine in my house.  I'm working with the person who found the bug to fix it and I'll post the fixed release as soon as I can.

Monterey was compiled with MinGW 4.8 32bit with Qt 5.1.0(mingw48_32) from the Qt SDK on Windows 7 64bit.

Sorry about this,

Chris

Tutorial: Adjustable UI with QSplitters


Monterey version 3.0 now has an adjustable UI!  Not only is the window itself able to be scaled, but now you can apportion the UI how you'd like.  If you want, you can make the graphs taller or shorter (even hide them), and you can adjust the widths of both side panels.  Upon closing, Monterey saves your window geometry so when you open it again, the UI is setup the way you like.

Here are the relevant pieces of code:
As you can see, it's all pretty simple and easy to do.  The default values are set using QSplitter::setStretchFactor(int index, int value), which uses the relative weight of each stretch factor to adjust the sizes.

Thanks for stopping by,

Chris Konstad

Monday, August 19, 2013

Monterey 3.0 Status Report

Good news!  Monterey is coming along nicely!  It is due in 13 days and it looks like we'll be able to make the release date.  There are still a few minor bugs left, but those are being worked on and progress is being made quickly.  The last "feature" that we have left to implement is the addition of a few more graphs along the top of the video display.  Then, Monterey should be ready to ship!  The bottomside code might experience some updates/changes to accommodate any changes in hardware , but Monterey itself will be ready.  And keep in mind, there will be periodic updates to Monterey after the 3.0 release that address any additional bugs and add features that were not able to be packaged with this release. 

I am incredibly excited about this release of Monterey as it will be a HUGE improvement over every previous version.  The addition of video capabilities is a key part of that!  

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

Friday, August 16, 2013

Monterey 3.0 Status Report

This is a screenshot of the most recent version of ROV-Suite's Monterey ROV control application.  There is now a working HUD and a newer, nicer theme thanks to QuantumCD's Dark Fusion palette.  As of right now, there are 12 open issues between Monterey 3.0 beta and Monterey 3.0 stable, but they should all be fairly easy to take care of.  A few of theme are graphical changes (removing those LEDs and replacing them with nicer status indicators) and some of them fix bugs.  Check here for more information.

Now I also have an important announcement to make.  Monterey has been shifted from my personal Github account to an ROV-Suite organization account.  You can find all repos and releases relating to Monterey at http://github.com/rovsuite.  I really do apologize for moving ROV-Suite around so much, but I do think that it's for the better.  I also wanted to make this change before releasing 3.0, which is a huge milestone for Monterey.

Please note that in it's current state, Monterey does not compile on Linux or run on OSX.  Both of those bugs are being looked at (I have already fixed the Linux issue but I still need to push it) and will be addressed soon.  Monterey will NOT be a Windows-exclusive.

Thanks for stopping by and I'll post some more information regarding changes to Monterey soon!

Chris Konstad

Sunday, August 4, 2013

New Download Location for ROV-Suite

Since I began moving ROV-Suite from SourceForge to GitHub this past year, I've been trying to figure out where to host the binaries for easy downloading.  After all, not everybody wants to have to compile an application before they use it.  Thankfully, ContingencyCoder told me about GitHub's "releases" sections of GitHub repos.  From now on, new releases of ROV-Suite, including Monterey, will be hosted on Github.  To find the latest binaries of Monterey, look here.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Setup Your Raspberry Pi to Run an ROV (along with an Arduino and Monterey)

Big news!  I spent some time today writing some scripts that will install all of the necessary software to configure a fresh Raspbian install to stream video, uptime and CPU temperature to Monterey.  Check it out at GitHub!  More features will be added later.  Right now, it downloads all dependent packages, compiles MJPG-Streamer and setups up autorun scripts.  All you have to do is put the scripts at /home/pi/ and run setupscript.sh.  It'll take care of the rest!  An internet connection is required.

I have a few extra features planned for Monterey now that the Raspberry Pi setup script is working.

  • Autoload video stream based on RPi's IP address
  • Arduino firmware loading (script still needs to be written)
Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Monday, July 15, 2013

ROV-Suite: OpenROV Compatible Bottomside

Here's the wiring diagram showing how to wire up the Arduino and Raspberry Pi (powered by a uBEC of your choice).  It's missing ethernet and the webcamera (along with any sensors of your choice), but those are easy to figure out where to plug in.  The webcamera plugs into the Raspberry Pi's second USB port (the Arduino is in the first one).  The ethernet might need to go to a small networking hub, but both the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi should be plugged into the ethernet.  Unlike OpenROV, which uses the BeagleBone as the only attachment point for the network which then forwards the command packets to the Arduino over serial, the Raspberry Pi in this setup doesn't act as a forwarder.  Instead, the Arduino gets the packets directly from Monterey.  The Raspberry Pi is there to forward the webcamera video, allow for remote Arduino firmware flashing, etc.  It is also used to power the Arduino, but that could also be done using the uBEC and the Arduino's VIN pin.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Monterey Update

Good news, everybody!  I've successfully gotten video to stream from a webcamera to Monterey through my Raspberry Pi!  Here's a picture of Monterey's GUI, with me sitting at my computer (a custom built desktop with dual 21.5" 1080p monitors, K70 mechanical keyboard, G500 mouse, etc) as an example IP video stream.

I set up my Raspberry Pi following this tutorial.  I used the official OpenROV spec'd webcamera, a WideCam F100.  Everything about it works pretty well!  My only complaint is a slight bit of lag, but it should be useable, especially for observation missions.

I want to add the ability to take high-res still photos with the ROV and send them up to the topside, as requested by Marcus.

Here's the latest commit in the HUD branch.

If you'd like to see features added to Monterey, or if you find any bugs, please open an issue with your request here.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Monterey v3.0 BETA in the works!

An early, ugly and pre-alpha build of Monterey v3.0.
Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Monterey, which is very much still a work in progress!  I've shifted hosting the latest version of the code from Sourceforge to Github because Github is a better service, in my opinion.  To keep updated, please look to the Github page (http://github.com/chriskonstad/monterey).  I've finally gotten video to work (kinda) by streaming the video feed from a USB webcamera using a Raspberry Pi and MJPG-Streamer, following this tutorial (the Google hompage is just a QWebView acting as a placeholder for the video feed).  +Eric Stackpole wrote a blog post on OpenROV's blog detailing his thoughts regarding OpenROV's UI and UX, and I'm not going to lie, it really influenced how I think Monterey should look.  Themeing Monterey is less important than getting features working, though, and I have some really cool features in the pipeline!

  • Remote flashing of ROV software using a Raspberry Pi
  • IP video via Raspberry Pi
  • HUD
  • PID algorithm for position holding
  • Exponentially weighted moving averages for smoothing sensor data
  • Vertical speed indicator
  • Tailored for OpenROV electronics and hardware (with the exception of replacing the BeagleBone with a Raspberry Pi)
  • An awesome theme borrowing heavily from Eric's mockup
I've already done some work the past two days on Monterey, bringing much needed improvements to the package.  I've learned more about proper software architecture and UI/UX design since I last worked on Monterey, and I hope it'll show in my new work.  While adding features to Monterey, I'll also be refactoring the older code to made it cleaner and easier to work on.  Also, Monterey 3.0 will link with the Qt5 libraries and use QQuick2 for some of the widgets (see the depth-tape for an example).

Features/bugs already worked on:
  • DiveTimer has been moved to it's own class and now automatically starts and pauses when the ROV enters and leaves the water.
  • Monterey now has a fullscreen mode!
  • The UI is now scalable, meaning Monterey now works on netbooks with 1024x600 displays through laptops with 1080p monitors.  This feature was long needed, and I'm glad I've gotten good enough at layouts to add this functionality.
Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Monday, June 24, 2013

MATE International ROV Competition 2013

The past week, I was in Tacoma, Washington at the MATE International ROV Competition 2013.  My team, Jesuit Robotics, took first place in the collegiate level ("Explorer" class)!  There were many awesome teams there with fantastic ROVs!

I'd like to take a moment to thank the team at MATE for putting on this incredible competition.  Through my time competing in the MATE ROV competition, I have learned much about machining, 3D CAD, electronics and software.  In fact, MATE is what introduced me to programming.  In college, I plan to do some research into ROV control systems, and I'd love to take a trip on a real research vessel.


The two pictures above are of the Bauman Moscow State Technical University's ROV control system.  That TV built into the TCU (see the upper picture) is a 3D TV with a view of the ROV's fully articulated arm.  Using an XBox360 controller to control the arm was easy, precise and intuitive thanks to the 3D vision!  Depth of field when operating underwater with a normal 2D camera system is non-existent.  I found the 3D vision system to be really useful!  Also, they mounted a touchscreen monitor between their joysticks to act as an instrument panel.  I think they have one of the coolest control systems at the MATE competition.  I would like to implement some of their features in my own software along with some other ideas I've been thinking of adding (an IMU for total position hold, for example).

Thank you, MATE, for putting on such an awesome competition!  Also, I'd like to thank the mentors of my robotics team, especially my dad, for putting so much time and effort into helping teach high school students about everything from NTSC video signals and composites to CNC mills and User Datagram Protocol packets.  Everyone involved in the MATE competition (administrators, judges and mentors) is helping the next generation of engineers learn how to be professional engineers in a fun and exciting field.  To everyone involved, thank you!

Thanks for stopping by,

Chris Konstad

Friday, June 14, 2013

What's Kept Me Busy the Past Week

This is the new Unit Circle Quiz, rewritten from the ground up in Java.  I decided to start doing my Android development the "proper" way, using Java instead of C++ and JNI.  I'm really pleased with how my app runs!  And while I still have a ton of reading and learning to do, I am LOVING Android's activities, intents and fragments!  I also love how the resources are split up, the strings.xml file (among others) and I really love the IDE.  I'm using the buggy and sometimes unstable Android Studio, but the feature set is fantastic.  I really cannot wait for Google to polish it up some more because, while not quite there yet, it is becoming an awesome IDE.

The new Unit Circle Quiz app has a lot of firsts for me.  It's my first Java application, ever.  It is my first app that has access to the Android APIs.  It is my first app that uses a SQLite database.  It's my first app with haptic feedback.  And... it will be my first app to have a free, ad-supported version alongside the normal paid version.  My goal is to release both versions of this app before I leave for Seattle for the MATE 2013 International ROV Competition with my robotics team, but we'll see what my schedule allows.  For now, the paid version has been updated.

Get it on Google Play

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Sorry for the Quietness

I've been kept really busy recently with my high school graduation and my robotics team's practice schedule, so I haven't had much time for personal programming projects.  For robotics, I had the opportunity to learn all about Qt's Event Filters, which are pretty cool and I'll definitely be using them more.  This summer, I plan to get more practice with QtQuick2 and I want to start learning Java because I'll need to know that language for college.  My goal is to publish a few more paid apps this summer so I can start making money on my programming hobby, but we'll see how well that goes.

Thanks for stopping by and please don't expect regular updates until sometime in July (once robotics is over)!

Chris

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

College Update

I've been really busy the past few weeks with college tours and scholarship interviews, and everything is finally coming to a close.  This next year, I will be attending the University of California, Los Angeles for Computer Science.  I can't wait!  Scholarship-wise, I have received a $10,000 scholarship from the UCLA Alumni Association and $10,000 from the Coca-Cola Scholarship Foundation.  I have met more amazing people through both programs than I could have ever imagined and I highly recommend that people apply for both scholarships!

For the Coca-Cola scholarship, I was flown out to Atlanta, Georgia for a weekend of fun and interviews.  There were about 250 of us scholars and we listened to presentations, toured various landmarks and were interviewed by some Coca-Cola Alumni.  It was an amazing program!  I met outstanding high school seniors from all over the country that had started non-profits, worked for defense contractors and fought gang-violence in their communities (just to name a few).  I can't even begin to say how truly honored I am to have met them!

For the UCLA Alumni scholarship, I had to go through a 3 part competition with the other 30-something scholars from around California.  I had to miss the first day, which was team building and games, because I was in Atlanta for my interview, but the second day was a ton of fun!  I met many awesome people and I can't wait to go to school with them next year!

Thanks for stopping by and Go Bruins!

Chris Konstad

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Update: Spring Break, College Acceptances, etc.

Sorry for being so quiet for awhile.  I went traveling with my family during Spring Break and didn't have access to a computer or internet for almost 2 weeks.  It was great to unplug for awhile!

In other news, I found out that I was accepted by USC, UCLA and UCSD for computer science!  I'm pretty thrilled to be able to choose between such great schools!

Right now, I have a few small tweaks coming down the line for the Unit Circle Quiz android app.  I fixed a small UI bug and I'm adding a main menu screen.  I might add some other features soon, and maybe a "lite" version, but we'll see.  For my school, I have a fair amount of work to do with our school club directory app, so that'll take up more of my free time from now until just after it launches.  And finally, I have a ton of work (as usually) to do for my robotics team.  I'm kept pretty busy!

I have big plans for this summer (my first summer without summer homework, and also my longest summer vacation to date).  I want to push out a few more Android apps and write a BUNCH of QML/C++ tutorials as I more fully learn how to leverage them together.  The official release of Qt 5.1 will help out with that...

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Sunday, March 17, 2013

UnitCircleQuiz

Good morning!  I have finally written and released my first paid-application!  It's called UnitCircleQuiz and I wrote it to help people memorize the unit circle.  It displays all of the angles in Radians and their corresponding coordinates within the unit circle.  The timer at the top records how long it takes you to complete the unit circle and the progress bar along the bottom shows you how far through the round you are.  Once completed, a high score list is shown with your best scores (percentage correct) and best times.

You can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrisk.UnitCircleQuiz.

For the technically inclined:  I wrote this app using QML and Qt C++, which was a pretty amazing experience!  I could easily and instantly test out any screen resolution and aspect ration by debugging the QML UI file as a native application on my computer.  If you're looking for a language to develop Android apps in, seriously consider QML and C++!

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Get it on Google Play

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Important: Fixed Monterey 2.0.3Beta Download for Windows

So I found out over the weekend that my zip archive on SourceForge for Monterey was lacking one DLL that caused Monterey to not function.  I just fixed the issue and uploaded a new zip.  You can find it here.  I feel really embarrassed for letting such a glaring issue slide by for so many months.  Sorry if I caused any problems!

I'm thinking about shifting rov-suite from SourceForge to Github because I like Github's social features and Github is just generally more polished.  If I do that, the executable binaries will be hosted elsewhere, maybe in the public folder of my DropBox, and linked to the Github page.

Thanks for stopping by,

Chris

Monday, February 18, 2013

Networking Test Update: Fixed Phone Layout



I updated NetworkingTest today to fix how it scales for phone screens.  Now, the tabbed UI gives you a better view of your received packets while improving the layout of the settings dialog.  Feature wise, nothing has changed.  This update only fixes a few bugs (see Google Play for more information) and fixes the scaling issue.

I highly recommend that you update to the latest version.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Thumb Hypoplasia Update: Version 1.1



I just updated Thumb Area to version 1.1.  In the update, I cleaned up the source code a little and I added a few user-visible features:

  • Overwrite protection: The user can no longer accidentally overwrite saved thumb data
  • Informative Save Successful Dialog: The dialog now shows the full file path instead of the path to the folder
This update is small but it is important.  I highly recommend updating!

Thanks for stopping by,

Chris Konstad

Friday, February 8, 2013

Thumb Hypoplasia App Released to Google Play!

I finally got around to uploading Thumb Area to Google Play, which is a pretty big milestone.  Now my app can start helping the people it was built to help!  I still have some modifications to make, like how it handles saving data pictures if the filename is already taken, but it's in a useful state right now.

Download it and check it out! Get it on Google Play

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Monday, January 28, 2013

Hypoplasia: Improved Algorithm Explained


Let's take a closer look at my outlier ignoring algorithm.  First, let's look at what is going on in the photo.  The tiny dots every are the data points gathered during a simulated left hand test.  The slightly transparent purple regions are the regions the algorithm "deletes" from the list of valid data points.  The cyan dot is the average point from the available data and the cyan lines are the lines made by the Cartesian coordinate system centered at the average point (I am aware that the cyan dot in this picture is not in the exact average location, but it is close enough to illustrate how the algorithm works).  The red numbers number each quadrant.


First off, the algorithm finds the average point of the collected data.  That point should be inside the circle made by the arc.  Next, the algorithm determines which hand is being tested.  In the screenshot, it uses the average point, but I have since changed it to use the first data point because patients start with their thumb along the side of the device and sweep their thumb towards themselves.  The change was made to accomodate smaller devices in which the test may take up the entire screen.  Once the average point and the hand being tested are found, the algorithm deletes all data in the 3rd quadrant for left handed tests and the 4th quadrant for right handed tests.  This region is represented by the semi-transparent magenta rectangle in the screenshot of the app.  A collection of data points along the edge of the screen is common during tests on smaller devices, but not on tablets, because the palm comes in contact with the screen.  

Second, the algorithm uses some statistics to calculate the maximum allowed distances between valid data points.  I have yet to take a stats class, so I used a formula that I found on Yahoo Answers.  I really wish my school offered AP Stats...

Third, the algorithm checks all remaining data points to see if they have a neighbor within the allowed maximum distance.  If they do, then the data point is assumed to be valid.  This caused problems earlier with the palm's invalid data points because they had neighbors within the allowed maximum distance, but they were all invalid data points.  But if the data point does not have a neighbor within the specified distance, then it is discarded.  In the screenshot of the app, you can see data points discarded by this part of the algorithm highlighted in a semi-transparent magenta circle.

That pretty much sums up the algorithm.  It can be processor intensive, especially the third part because of the number of calculations involved, but since the user starts the process by clicking on the "analyze data" button I'm not too worried if it takes a second or two to finish.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Update: Robotics, Thumb Hypoplasia, Algorithms, etc.


I've been busy recently with school work, Robotics and working on the thumb hypoplasia app.  My homework load is manageable, but it keeps me busy (thank you, AP classes).

As far as Robotics goes, we've been having double workdays so that we can get in the water a little early, and we're making the most complex ROV we've ever had.  We are designing and making many parts that we used to buy commercially, and we are packing more electronics onboard the ROV than we *ever* have before.  This ROV is going to have more processing power than my first computer (a Win98 SE hand-me-down).  To top it all off, we have the absolute COOLEST electronics canister.  It honestly belongs in a Sci-Fi movie!  I wish I could post some pictures, but you'll have to wait for our team's official tech report.  Sorry!

The lab that I'm working with for the thumb hypoplasia app recently got a Samsung Galaxy Player, so I've been busy optimizing the app for their screen size and making changes as they report issues discovered during their field testing.  For example, on my A500 (10.1" tablet), there were no accidental touches by the palm on the edge of the screen, but on the Galaxy Player it is quite easy to accidentally touch the edge.  I worked out a function last night to remove one outlying point.  I need to modify the algorithm because it only works for a single outlying point and it needs to be able to remove many.  Here's an explanation of the function:

It takes a little time to execute when there are many data points to check, but that doesn't really affect the user experience as it is only run when the user tells the app to analyze the data.

This summer, I plan to work on many projects.  I want to finish the Git client during summer vacation, and I'd really like to finish porting Monterey to Android.  I also want to tweak ROV-Suite to add in some Raspberry Pi fun (probably on the bottomside).

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad


Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Android Git Client (GUI)


Great news!  I've started working on a GUI Git client for Android devices.  Right now, all it does is install Git and then display the version, but I'll expand on the feature set in the coming months.  It is written in Qt using Necessitas.  Right now, I use wget (from BusyBox, I believe) to download a Git binary, but I plan on writing a downloader class to handle that because stock Android does not have wget (or that's what my testing has shown).  The UI then passes commands to the git binary using QProcess.  Yes, this is not the most elegant way to handle Git, but it works.  Also, this will let me expose the entire feature set of Git to the GUI.  You can find the source for it here.  Please keep in mind that the current app is currently in a proof-of-concept state, so the code may be a little sloppy.  Sorry about that!  I'll be cleaning up the current code as I flesh out this app.

You can find the proof-of-concept build here.  When you run it, please be patient with the initial black screen!  I need to show a progress indicator for the git binary download, but right now there is no indication that the app is running.  It should show a black screen for a few seconds while it downloads the 5.5MB binary.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad