A Little August Update

Well I just had quite a nice break from it all and experienced the fun of herding my set of little children round various tourist attractions. An exhausting experience for sure.

So lets get back to tech stuff. Well the android release of working late has gone as expected. A small number of downloads, A couple of 5 star rating and a couple of lower star ratings. Comments where not great on it but I have thick skin:)

I will probably do a bit of an update for this to catch some more of my grammatical mistakes fairly soon.

So what did I learn. Well on the tech front local storage is a bit hit an miss when you integrate in AdMob ads. There are bugs somewhere but I am not sure what stops it from working, the timer based workaround works on my hardware but does it work well on others? I just don't know. For anything more than a throw away app I have to be certain. 

The only way to be certain is to no use it. I have looked at providing my own saving and restore functionality (calling back into Java code). Reading the docs it seems remarkably easy to call from JS to Java code on an android phone. This is the approach I plan on taking for the slightly more complex apps I am making.

Beta 2 of JQueryMobile has also been released. It seems to have fixed all the bugs I was getting on android. Transitions now work as expected. Speed is still a bit of an issue for transition. I am using a Nexus One for development, I guess it is not the fastest phone anymore but I would like the transitions to be a little bit smother. Their is talk of improving the performance of JQueryMobile between Beta 3 and the official release.

I am slightly tempted to release one of the apps I have been working on before JQueryMobile hits version one just because well I am impatient. The more logical side of me says wait releasing early will only end up causing problems or getting bad reviews. 

Given August is going to be quite bitty in terms of getting things done I think I will, as much as possible, just keep my head down working and try to get each app working well and ready for release while waiting on JQueryMobile to mature some more.