2024 01

31

Control now has support for Android App Shortcuts, which means you can add an icon for any control to your phone launcher/homescreen:

29

Three weeks without an update… we had a house sale fall through and a beloved 16 year old pet died. Control development has continued. It now has (limited) support for Intents so you can have a group for local radio stations played via VLC. A long press on a control now takes you to the Overview screen, currently from there you can only edit or delete a control, but the idea is that’ll be a hub for all kinds of Android deep integration (shortcuts, quick tiles, widgets etc).

8

I had a few hours free yesterday (Sunday) but they were entirely taken up in Android dependency hell. Getting Room and Hilt playing nicely together with various other dependencies, build targets, Gradle, Kotlin, and JVM versions etc. Lots of downloads too on our limited bandwidth cellular connection. Finally needed to update Android Studio and then redownload dependencies, a full half day. I did manage to get the empty state Compose interface build last night though:

The illustration is from oldbookillustrations.com/, an old wood block print with the surrounding scenery edited out in Gimp(I wish they’d change the project name, it was a puerile pun when the project was started despite the denials, and the rebuttals are typical Gnu childishness - the original authors themselves state it came from Pulp Fiction).

There’s been another nice video of Modular Play from a user: all.electric.kitchen/w/btgN5JyNCsBASNeBKEKqQg. I’ve also started adding user posts on Instagram: Instagram to a Story collection. ## 6

I’ve implemented one-to-many storage in Control. There are Groups, and Groups have Shortcuts. This is all Room implementation wrapped in a repository interface, exposed as a Flow in the ViewModel. I’ve setup the Android NavigationController to handle various states (main scrolling list, new, edit), next step is to start building those interfaces in Compose.

Not had too much time on this today, just a spare hour at the end of the day to decompress from looking after the kids.

5

No updates, busy with work. Complex relationships on Room look tricky and a little painful, so I’m going to take some time to get the foundations for Control written correctly.

Perplex On posted a fantastic video using Granular last night, that always gets some traffic to my projects. Much appreciated, I’m going to send them an advanced copy of ModularPlay with the new Granular module.

4

Kontrol is now Control. I have it functional with a simple hard-coded repository, it’s great. The harder work comes next though; adding the Room database with ability to group entries (one shortcut to many groups etc). The main screen is a single scrollable region with shortcuts broken up into groups, the idea being I’ll have a group for the Cambridge Audio AXN10, another for the Naim Mu-so, and other for whatever use-cases I can think of for this app. Once the database is in place it’ll be time to build the add/edit screen, that shouldn’t be too challenging though (famous last words).

Work is busy so little spare time for thinking about side projects currently. Analog Modular is supposed to be released on the Playdate Store this month but ADHD has typically made me not keep on top of things, will chase up with Panic and see what the next steps are. I’m not even sure it’s bug-free enough for them (to be fair (to myself) it’s a huge codebase now, far more complex than most games on the platform).

2

I’ve started a new Android project called Kontrol. It will allow users to assemble http requests, much the same as Postman (desktop API test tool), and a few other ‘Api test’ type apps on the Play Store. Kontrol’s ui will be more user-friendly though, with the intent that the main use-case is as an alternative interface for connected devices in the home (mainly my Cambridge Audio AXN10 streamer and the Naim Mu-so). It’s a good excuse to create an Android project outside the day-job with a modern stack: Compose, Hilt, Room, OkHttp, Flow etc.

For the desktop this can be achieved with the MacOS Shortcuts app which I’ll post about some other time.

1

A new year. I tried Obsidian’s Daily Notes feature but a journal like that isn’t my style. I did get on with the December Adventure format (see 2023 12) so will continue with monthly pages like this and see how it goes.