Developer blog by Audrius Keturakis. Return to main page

March 24, 2017. Today I have a long walk with the family, testing watch and app synchronization. When phone and watch can see each other, it always worked reliably. The problem is, normally the phone is in suspend mode when you make actions on the watch. Hence the messages must be queued on the watch, sent when the link is finally established, be re-sent as needed and acknowledged by the phone when received. Then, the phone needs to remember that it has acknowledged and that not, and be ready to resend this information as well. Despite of real hell of automated tests we have, seems that nothing can replace a pair of the two real communicating devices in the final test. I created additional "activity buttons" - "Bug 1", "Bug 2", "Bug 3" and "Bug 4" and keep switching between them as I walk with the family. All entries went nicely into phone when I ultimately allowed the devices to talk in the evening. Looks simple now from the side. That a hell it was in the first alpha tests, better even not to remember.

March 25, 2017. Today I released the version 2.58 that vibrates when any of the balances crosses the zero. This was inspired by my personal experience - when concentrating hardly on work, it often takes me a good hour to notice that all todays scheduled working hours are long gone. Sound alarm may be too much. Even for vibration, I added the option to turn it off, and is off by default. Vibration support on Android seems very good - it is possible to set the vibration pattern. I picked some rhythm pattern from memory my music teacher played in school thirty years ago. Shame not to have the drum player in the team.

March 26, 2017. In the morning, vibration device suddenly scanted me the "zero crossed" signal because the indication changed from +2 (2 hours overtime today) to -8 (8 hours to do today again). This is probably not good. I have changed the logic to vibrate only when balance changes from negative to positive (on any indicator).

March 30, 2017. Google posted the message that apps must contain metadata on the supported screen aspect ratios. In my case this is easy, the button area at the bottom can easily expand efficiently even if the device is like French baton. Declared the max aspec ration 1:5, had no courage to set more.

April 4, 2017. Today I have discovered that connectivity between watch and phone may disappear if watch has been kept foo far away for really long time. Bluetooth is on, but watch status in this fancy Android Wear app changes to "disconnected" - and do whatever you want from the app programmatically! I have checked all documentation carefully, tried some reverse engineering and even sacrified some my Stack Overflow points for the bounty ther - no avail. Looks more like Android Wear bug. Thank goodness, at least it is easy to re-connect the watch manually, first item in the local menu, so all that remain is to update the web and built-in documentation. All else we were able to do is to add the toast that reminds to connect the watch, if expected (during the subsequent four days only, we do not want you to stay sorry for longer if you have lost that watch).

April 9, 2017. This week I worked on printing the job activity reports diretly from the mobile device. This works surprisingly well, Google Cloud Print managed to upload the PDF documents to Google Drive at least. I also installed the Epson printing service that found my XP-850 and I was able to print reports from mobile device on it no problem - directly, not via PC. PDF support was already in the app, but we have it now somewhat enhanced, including summaries and totals that were initially missing. The app also got the new "Revert" button in the Oops action that just simply cancels the last clock-in or clock out. Quite enough as for a week. All these new features are currently in beta testing and will be included into the next release.

April 13, 2017. We have submitted the app into two contests. App for business in Best mobile app awards and Mopria "Tap to print". Will be seen.

April 14, 2017. A small watch-only patch has been released to support turning the vibration alert on and off if the watch-only app. This setting is normally adjusted on the phone. Somewhat to our surprise, the Wear 2.0 watch-only app seems gaining traction, even if it currently cannot do as much as the phone version.

April 23, 2017. Today - a big day, we finished work on the report uploading into Google Calendar. Of course, we have Google Drive already, and printing we have, but these are still more for individual viewing. Google Calendar makes Overtime Control a completely different class of the app, as Calendars can be shared. Having good web UI basically for free is also nice. Still beta today but we will release in a few days.

April 29, 2017. Received the Amazon gift card from Mopria "Tap to Print" organizers. This is only "entry reward", only means that the app has been tested, meets basic requirements and now enters the competition. Still not bad. We will buy some really good programming book on Amazon for this money.

Overtime control