If you're not interested in testing an early alpha, I totally understand that's up to you. If you just want to keep an eye on my progress, take a look at every now and then. If you are feeling adventurous, please try my alpha release and let me know what you think. The HP-42S emulation should work right now on any Android phone with a 320x480 screen and OS version 1.5 or later. You can't download it from Android Market yet, so if your phone does not allow side-loading, you won't be able to use the alpha, unfortunately. On both devices the application terminates when the devices is turned from landscape to portrait and vice versa (no visible forced close). Also on both, one has to start the application sometimes twice, as the first start returns nothing. I haven't tried dealing with landscape mode yet - I should probably just disable that until I'm ready to to deal with it. Crashing is certainly not desirable behavior. I just installed the app on a borrowed AT&T HTC Aria, and I have to start it twice quite often, too. I don't know what's going on there yet, but I'll have to look into it. I've noticed this failure to launch even in the simulator, but it doesn't happen very often there. Clearly something that needs to be looked into! (UPDATE: Actually, it happens all the time in the simulator, or more precisely, every second time. ![]() Looks like I have some old-fashioned printf debugging to do!) (UPDATE 2: Maybe I'm just not dealing with the Android app life cycle correctly, and the app appears to die on startup when the OS tries to revive an instance that wasn't shut down cleanly.) It just doesn't seem to happen while running under debugger control. I've installed the alpha release using the eoeAppInstaller application in the Droid Market. I tried installing it on an AT&T HTC Aria using eoeAppInstaller, but that didn't work. It gave me an error message telling me to go to Settings -> Applications and allow unknown sources, but that option wasn't there. ![]() Not surprising, since I knew that this phone does not allow sideloading, but apparently eoeAppInstaller doesn't let you get past that restriction, either. I did manage to install the app in the end, using the adb tool from the Android SDK. That wasn't exactly painless, either I had to download and install "HTC Sync" just to get the Android USB driver (for Windows), and that package also installed some other junk that I don't think I want. And just finding HTC Sync on the HTC web site was a bit of a trek, too. I'm impressed so far with the speed and performance on OS1.6! Writing up installation instructions for non-Market-users will be a ton of fun, I can already tell. Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with it on the Aria, too. I was worried at first because it felt a bit slow on the emulator (both on my Mac and my PC), but, then again, the Free42 core is native code, which runs on an emulated ARM CPU in the emulator, and that slows things down a lot. On the real device, it looks like a dead heat between the Aria and the iPod touch 4 so far, which is pretty good, considering that the Android app has a Java UI and lots of JNI calls between the UI and the core. While I do try to keep the overhead to a minimum, it's nice to hear that that's actually working out. ![]() I get the impression that in both scenarios - the app exiting when the device switches to landscape mode, and the app failing to launch - the app isn't actually exiting, it's merely hidden. The next time you try to launch after either scenario, the app slides into view, rather than popping up, which makes it look like it was running already. Also, I don't see anything in the logs to indicate app death.Īs long as you make a point of leaving the app using the "home" button, rather than using the "back" button or the OFF function, the app comes up at the first attempt every time (or until the OS decides to unload it by itself, of course). I clearly have some figuring out to do as to how Android manages app state presumably there are some messages from the OS that Free42 needs to handle that it currently doesn't.
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