Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Widget Lockscreen beta 1.1 (r2)

It's not perfect but it's pretty damn great.




See ----(setup accessed from app drawer, menu key is open)



See some more -- the original myLock vision, nearly accomplished - get Executive Assistant widget for converged event preview.




Widget Setup screen now a working alpha

With this setup screen, you choose the widgets you want. You undo if you don't like the most recently added one. You bask in the glory of widgets in their natural habitat.

http://mylockforandroid.googlecode.com/files/customLock_.apk

fire it up and then launch customLock if you want glory.

I am merging this in to custom lockscreen 1.0 to replace the music button area in the custom lockscreen with your widgets per how they have been added in the setup screen. when you are in the setup screen you'll see the clock also, this setup screen is how it was during all pre-alpha code building

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Widget personalization coming soon -- myLock custom lockscreen apps

Here's what soon means at the moment: I have the code that let's you pick the widget, and it appears centered. What I need to do is finish the logic which makes a widget appear on the next row once the space is all used up. Then I just need to finish the process that stores the choices and the one that grabs all the choices and puts the widgets in when the replacement lockscreen activates.

I am assuming most people will want the clock display but I bet some will want to fill the whole screen with widgets. The positioning is the most complicated thing. The stock homescreen method is not simple to copy, & the process for implementing widgets is nearly undocumented in the sdk also.

I only have a few hours a week to work on this due to work. I've had most of my existing progress on widgets for a while now just trying to find the time to finish all the code.

I made major progress during the last round of updating in the myLock auto unlock version so I am looking forward to bringing those stability improvements to the advanced lockscreen version and also pushing out the guarded replacement lockscreen (which strictly replaces the lockscreen and keeps the default keys locked down) while finishing up the widget feature.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

myLock (basic) updated on the market

The update I've been slowly testing and revising for the basic lockscreen skip mode is now up in the market. Mainly, this update incorporates all the improvements I've learned from programming the custom lockscreen revisions.

  • Fixed handling for outside events like the alarm clock, or handcent. It integrates quite well with screebl pro, I've found.
  • Phone call error cases resolved.. I did quite a bit of testing of the fixes for the specific troubles in the first market release. If we discover any more they will now be easy to incorporate in to the phone event mediator.
  • New feature - guarding unlock from opening the slider.
  • Removed the toggle button-- it is now a checkbox that is more intuitive when the status icon isn't enabled. This allowed me to re-implement the 1x1 widget toggle, which will soon be improved to also display the enabled/disabled status
  • Added how-to text in the settings window, I refer to it affectionately as myLock for dummies.
V1.1 - Adjusted phone call reaction handling to be smoother. Will optimize with useful enhancements in 2.1 soon. Added toggle for the slider guard mode. Can't get slider guarded mode to perform well without the wallpaper background theme, but I bet the other mode should work great even when live wallpaper is on since I was able to get the actual lockscreen disabling window to be a transparent theme instead of wallpaper.

V1.2 - Updated slide guard mode so it is integrated with the rest of the stable revision, dropping the wallpaper lockscreen replacement mode due to major performance issues in certain circumstances. I will continue to research adding this mode back as an option, since some people like having the wallpaper during unlock. Now when slider guard is on, you will just do the regular slide to unlock screen if you are intentionally waking up the phone via slider.

If you have run into some critical problem and feel the other version worked better, feel free to revert:

The v1 and 1.1 are also available on the downloads history if you choose the project downloads link on the left main sidebar.


The next update is targetting to add guard during calls as a choice due to popular request, and also the idle lock time preference that restores security if the phone is left idle for too long. In addition I've learned how to put in button customization advanced mode, this would allow you to press camera to unlock it from sleep if you wanted to. Also looking in to adding shake and orientation sensing options to help further guard against pocket unlocks and make it easier to unlock when in trusted orientations.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

project temporarily on hold

Never fear, the purpose of this communication is simply to express my regret that I don't have more time to dedicate to finishing up these next updates. The big new features I have next are ones that can't easily be rolled out incrementally like I have been but I still plan to put each test build for opt-in download at the project page, allowing you to roll back to the market version if you find an intolerable issue.

I have also passed on the source to another great dev who is planning to implement a lot of the same custom button unlock functionality we've been working on. I still plan to resume and finish the 3 different replacement lockscreen modes including widget support when I have more time. This should not be a long downtime but I did not want to leave anyone hanging wondering why no progress at the moment.