howdy, Bill!

hey Mark

dude... what is with the android MediaPlayer component? Do you have any light on some of the error codes that thing generates?

I'm trying to release a video-serving app to the market, and that component has become the bane of my existence

unexplained error codes, erratic behavior on different devices

unreliable results, etc

Bill: not really, particularly now that they changed to Stagefright from the original OpenCORE implementation

MediaPlayer is difficult unless you are controlling the content

(btw, howdy, fitz!)

how do you mean "controlling the content"?

Hello - just observing so no questions here

it's ours, in a sense, but it is being served up by our CDN

well, that should be OK

that's a far cry from "I'm trying to play this semi-random stream I found on the Intarweb"

but, from an error standpoint, MediaPlayer has been a problem for a long time

lots of cryptic warnings and stuff

is there a better implementation for streaming video from the internet that I don't know about?

yeah, and unexplain errors like "UNKNOWN_ERROR -1004"

nothing in the OS

or -31

I haven't played with streaming video much in the past 15 months

okay... fair enough

hence, I have no idea what those error codes might mean

another question involves use of CWAC

Mark - when developing I have been using emulator only - should I get a Android cell to test against - I have read that live cell acts differently - using eclipse for Android etc.

fitz: you definitely want to test on hardware before releasing an app

i would strongly recommend it! :-)

ok - so if I want to also port to tablet when out then buy one EH!

I'd start with a phone, unless you're making an app targeted at tablets

you do not need one of everything

however, you really do need one of something

i'm using the CWAC list-related stuff in many places (task, adapter, thumbnail, endless), but I keep getting these exceptions reported to me from the field: java.lang.IllegalStateException: The content of the adapter has changed but ListView did not receive a notification. Make sure the content of your adapter is not modified from a background thread, but only from the UI thread

will cell carriers if selling phone now on 2.2 move to 2.3 or is that a wild card - as in I could expect to move up? reason I ask is maybe wait to get cell that has 2.3 on it

and I've checked every place i am modifying contents, and it's all on the UI thread

Bill W: tough to answer that in the abstract

there may be spots where I am failing to chain notifyDataSetChanged() or something

I know I have that fixed in EndlessAdapter

might not in ThumbnailAdapter, since I haven't touched that in ages

okay...i may be using an older implementation of that, so I'll be sure to update

(it's overdue for a rewrite)

fitz: eventually, carriers will get 2.3 phones, it is merely a question of when

it is generally difficult to predict that sort of thing, except for what is announced

ok - you liking 2.3 yet or just a yawn version?

Mark, is there a place that gets updated if bugs like that get fixed? so I'll have an idea definitively, when I'm updating to a newer version, of whether that should get addressed? (I never see them while testing in house, FWIW)

Bill: you can follow the github repo

or keep tabs on the repo's home page

sorry... i should have been more specific... i didn't know if that was already assigned to a specific bug number, or if there is any way of tracking it

i guess I'll just diff the version comments though

oh, no

thanks

fitz: 2.3 is interesting, but most of the cool stuff is outside my areas of expertise (gaming) or requires hardware (NFC)

Bill: For recently-maintained stuff, the repo's home page has a changelog

things I haven't updated in ages (e.g., ThumbnailAdapter) don't

cool cool...

any other questions?

any suggestions on the best way to investigate sporadic OutOfMemoryError reports from the field? (that can't be reproduced in house)

are you getting stack traces, at least?

if you are not getting stack traces, use Flurry or ACRA or something

i am getting stacktraces...

if you are, the most likely OutOfMemoryError culprit seems to be bitmaps -- make sure you are aggressive about calling recycle() on those

they often occur when decoding Bitmaps from input streams, or trying to inflate a layout from an XML file

well, inflating a layout on its own is not very memory intensive

it's probably tied to bitmaps, then

interesting...

all of the images in our app are loaded remotely

one of the things I need to do with ThumbnailAdapter is take better care of the bitmaps

are you downloading thumbnail-sized images, or are they being resized on the device?

for the thumbnailadapters, they are mainly thumbnail sized when i download them

but the device may be trying to resize them

well, so long as they aren't huge images that are being scaled, that should not be a problem, I wouldn't think

but it doesn't take many full-size images to run you out of heap space on some devices

yeah

so it may not be worth pursuing... if it's just a sporadic thing, and limitation of smaller slimmer implementations?

any patterns of what devices you get the error on

?

our remote stacktrace reporting tool isn't including that info...

i guess it probably should

maybe i'll look into ACRA

yeah, grabbing the android.os.Build values is probably a good idea

I haven't used it -- I just know it by name

we're using remote-stacktrace

any other questions?

nope I am gone cya

i'm looking into doing some last minute app features (namely "sharing on twitter/facebook/etc")

i saw in the books some references to JTwitter, etc.

that is one approach

should I rely on Android's intents system to handle this problem? what about people that don't have twitter clients installed?

I would just use ACTION_SEND

most bang for the buck

and they get a selection of recipient to receive that intent? (i.e. share on twitter? share on facebook? email?)

they get a selection of activities

they choose the activity, which lets them send/post/whatever

oh totally

twitter would tweet, gmail would send an email to selected addresses, etc.

awesome

see the Introspection and Integration chapter of the Advanced Android book for samples

howdy, Julian!

hi Mark

only a few more minutes -- got a quick question?

Sorry to be so late - hopefully won't be late

yes

simple one

I have a Cursor which returns results from multiple tables

and each table has a column with the same column name eg. _id or title

is there a way to distingush between them in the Cursor or ask for the column names to be named differently on returning the Cursor?

rename them in the query

ah ok I'll look in SQLite

use the "AS alias" syntax

that's gonna save a world of pain

SELECT _ID AS Foo, ...

oh yeah.. I've seen that in EJBQL or soemthing

thank you!

of course, ideally, you know the order of your columns in the Cursor, and therefore do not care about the names, only the indices

that's what I've been doing

but it's hard to aintain the code

maintain

to return new columns...

anyhow you've solved it!

bfn

any final question?