Tub Thumper Pro for Android out this week

At long last, we're looking at releasing Tub Thumper Pro for Android this week.

We've been into Android Development since day one and I've been constantly suprised at the amount of positive feedback we've had from the first version of Tub Thumper. We receive emails daily asking us about the pro version so I'm hoping it's going to be well received.

I'll put some more details online once it's live in the Android Market, but here's a screenshot of the sequencer interface in the meantime, which is one of the coolest new bits.

You'll need at least Android 1.5 to run it and a touchscreen device. It's pushing the low-level audio features of Android with this tool, although I already have plans for Tub Thumper Pro 2! Watch this space...

Android AudioTrack source

I've been doing a lot of work optimising our audio playback on Tub Thumper Pro for Android this week and I constantly find myself referring back to the C++ source for the OS to help solve latency issues.

For anyone doing work with the AudioTrack object, it's worthwhile bookmarking the source online so that you can browse it whenever you hit a problem.

Here's two links I find really useful:

• AudioTrack.cpp
• AudioFlinger.cpp

Incidentally, I've found that the best way of getting low-latency polyphonic audio is to subclass AudioTrack and call finalize() yourself after you're done playing; I was seeing more "write blocked for xx seconds" messages before I did this, although it may be co-incidental.

Useful tool for building Android user interfaces

Android user interfaces are built using XML and the support for graphically laying these out in Eclipse is limited to say the least. (There are many things wrong with Visual Studio .NET but at least the UI builder is reasonably well sorted...)

A while back I came across DroidDraw - a third party tool for prototyping UIs. I think I must have had an early build back then because it had some issues, but I downloaded the latest build today and it's now hugely useful.

If you want to throw some Android user interfaces together head over to http://droiddraw.org/ and try it out. It's the tool Google should have included with the SDK!

Android Activity States and State Transitions

I wanted to tidy a bit of our Android code up recently to make sure that each Activity was handing it's state properly and to make sure that things were getting cleaned up when the Activity was done.

Before doing this it was important to fully understand the lifecycle of an Android Activity and to understand the state transitions that will and can occur within one.

An Android activity basically exists in one of four states:

Here's a bit more detail about each of these states:

Active

The Activity is in the foreground of the screen and is interacting with the user

Paused

The Activity has temporarily lost focus behind a new non-fullscreen or transparent Activity. In this state is retains all of it's state, however, if Android detects a low-memory situation it may be killed.

Stopped

The Activity is totally obscured behind another Activity. Again it retains it's state, but is much more likely to be killed at any point.

Finished

The Activity has been closed, either by Android or by calling finish(). The state it had dies at this point (unless you explicitly save it).

There are seven events in the Android Activity Lifecycle which give you a bit of control over what happens during each state transition.

onCreate(Bundle icicle)

Fires when the Activity is first launched. You would normally do all of your setup in this method. You can also retrieve any previously saved state from the supplied Bundle.

onStart()

Called when the Activity is becoming visible to the user, for example when another Activity higher in the stack has closed.

onRestart()

Called after the Activity has been stopped and is being restarted.

onResume()

Called when the Activity is becoming interactive to the user.

onPause()

Called when Android is about to start resuming another Activity. You would normally use this to stop anyting dynamic that is happening in your Activity, e.g sounds playing, animations happening.

onStop()

Called when the Activity is no longer visible, usually because another Activity has started over the top of it.

onDestroy()

This is the last breath of your Activity, called just before Android pulls the plug on it.

Here's a state transition diagram to show the sequence of states and the events in between:

Our Android app in Top 100 Best Smartphone apps of all time!

Well oil my bike. Our first Android app, Tub Thumper, has just been listed in the "Hot 100 best apps" by T3 Magazine.

We still get plenty of feedback about the free version (mostly positive thankfully) and we're trying to get the Pro version out ASAP.

I'll be very interested in seeing how it runs on my Motorola Droid phone, when it arrives, given it has a multitouchscreen...

You can view the gallery here: http://www.t3.com/feature/t3s-hot-100-apps

Update - here's a shot of the app at number 1 in this months T3 magazine!

Android RC33 for the UK coming soon

Whilst US users of the T-Mobile G1 received the latest update to Android, the so called "RC33" release earlier this month, UK users have been somewhat left in the dark, still stuck on RC8.


RC33 brings a number of cool things to Android, notably voice search and Google Latitude. Note that this isn't the long awaited "Cupcake" branch of Android - it'll be a while (if ever) until we get that on a G1.

According to a comment on this blog post, someone called T-Mobile support and was told to expect the update "sometime around February 20th".

Let's hope they're not lying - I've been developing on Android SDK 1.1 without a hardware device to test it on!

Incidentally - if you want RC33 but don't want to wait, you can follow the instructions here to get it. Don't come crying to me if you brock your phone though... ;-)

Second Android Handset unveiled

During this week, the Mobile World Congress has been in progress in Barcelona, and whilst we were expecting to see a whole raft of Android gubbins, it seems that the only big news is the release of the second Android-powered handset, in the form of the HTC Magic.

The Magic will be available exclusively on Vodafone and will be the first handset to feature the Cupcake branch of Android.

This is major news for us here at SASS Digital as Cupcake features signficantly improved Audio-APIs which will help no end in our ongoing development of music applications.

The big question is - will it support multi-touch? I suspect I know the answer...