Revamping Fireside Talk UI

The UI of my Campfire client is now updated to use action bar on all supported devices. It uses better available space on screen while providing nice user experience. Together with this set of changes I modified the theme to use light background colors as this seems more common on modern devices. Other than that I spent some time to add support for image displaying.

There were some quirks with NetBeans IDE support for Andriod development so I had to tune it little bit.

More features for Fireside Talk app

As suggested in previous post the support for transcript loading is added to Fireside Talk client. It took me a while to learn the concept of fragments and apply it to this project. Now the application uses different fragments as tabs when showing room activity.

There was some additional work to add some button and images in a way that looks acceptable on different platform and tune the layout little bit for landscape and portrait modes. The picture shows landscape mode where the buttons are moved to the left side to leave some extra space needed to show messages. There are shown as a row of buttons above the message area in portrait mode.

Campfire client for Android

My current pet project is Fireside Talk - Campfire client running on Android. It is now available on Android Market Google Play. I have a lot fun there and learned a lot of things.

Here are some of them:

• A few activities with AsyncTasks to perform network communication was good enough start.
• Later I changed that to activities + content provider to persist the data between sessions.
• The next important step is to add a service to run asynchronous updates.
• Resources are expensive on device so I decided to build a server side to watch for updates in chats and notify the device through C2DM. 
• The backend on server is now simple HTTP server running on Grizzly. (It is a pain to resolve dependencies of their Maven project to get it set up with pure Ant build).
• I played a little bit to set up security for the communication between device and server.
• Then I updated my Samsung Galaxy Tab to Android 3.2 to see some new bugs. So I went to fix them. Including bunch of threading violations.
• The plan now is to add few more features like transcripts, search, file attachments and improve the user experience on tablets.

I can post some more detailed comments on these later. At the moment I am busy with all this work. As a side effect I have various ideas how to improve development support in NetBeans because obviously I am using NBAndroid plugin.