Sorry...

I started Slidehome project over the summer out of frustration with the death of Slidescreen. I am a high school teacher and am also working on my Masters in IT. Once the school year started, I quickly ran out of free time and Slidehome fell by the wayside. I do hope/intend to pick up where I left off after the school year, but that is many months from now.

I made some very basic progress and all the code that is completed is available. If somebody wants to take over the project, I will would not mind giving over the project (administration over the google code/github/forums/blogger site)as long as it remains free and open-source.

Chris Spooner

Milestone 1.3

I have started real work on Milestone 2. I have a working menu and with two options. The "Home Settings" option is non-functional, but the "Phone Settings" option launches the phone settings application.

Get Milestone 1.3 here: http://code.google.com/p/slidehome/downloads/detail?name=SlideHome%20-%20Milestone%201.3.apk&can=2&q=

More Sites!

Well I have had yet another person volunteer to help with development. Jakub Chrzanowski will be gettimg me most of the way to milestone 1.2 by adding a generic preference activity. I hope to have milestone 1.2 done by the end of this weekend, along with some major code cleanup.

All development will now officially be happening on github! See https://github.com/DJGHOSTS3V3N/slidehome.

If you are interested in helping with development please join the development forum: http://slidehome.lefora.com/

Sorry for the Silence

I've started up work. Just a little about me. I am a High School technology/pre-engineering teacher. I have been on summer break until this week. Summer break gave me a lot of time to work, and let me get this project started. Beyond work, I am working on my Masters in IT. I will now be doing more of my work on weekends so development might be a bit slower. I've been very happy with the interest in this project and look forward where it will go.

Now that's out of the way...My goal this weekend is to build the preferences screen and start to build the favorites scroll-view.

I also now have two more people helping me. Dan Lundmark and Nisha Holloway will be helping out with the graphic design. Their first goal is build an icon for SlideHome, if you have any ideas please reply with them.

Yay for Open Source

I have had a great out-pouring of support for this project this weekend and actually have some help. GHOSTS3V3N has set up a project page at git hub (https://github.com/DJGHOSTS3V3N/slidehome) and will start to help with development. Another person, Rafa Gisbert, has offered to help with a Spanish translation. Finally I might have somebody willing to help with UX and design elements, I will post more as I get more info. This is great news as I will be starting up at work (High School Teacher) this week which will eat into my late night development time.

 I hope to clean up Milestone 1 today, and start work on Milestone 2. I am giving up on trying to save the AppsList to storage for now, as I don't want to get hung up on a small detail early in the project. I also think I might see about building some UML diagrams to convey my greater plans for the project. 

Milestone 1.2

Apparently SlideHome is actually being used! This made my night, but it also pointed out a problem that I ad missed where if a phone had a very high resolution screen or low dpi, the app would not fill the screen. I tracked down the bug and made the change.

I have also started to change how the apps are loaded. The slow portion of the load is building the list of applications, not creating the grid of icons (as I had believed). I have saved the list of applications to the bundle but have found that the bundle does not persist after the app is fully closed. I  think I see about saving this list to a file instead. I want this to start quickly because I waste more time (4-6 seconds per boot, it feels long) booting the application then I'd like and this will only get worse as the application gets bigger.

I have also been thinking about my milestones. I think my next milestone will be the preference screen, rather then the custom view to hold favorite applications. I have a Spanish translator who has offered to do the translation work on SlideHome and I would love to get that work flow going. If you are interesting in translating SlideHome send me an email (cmspooner@gmail.com) and I will let you know when I am ready. The preferences will be more useful to those using this as a simple launcher and will allow me to put in settings to see how they act without the need to re-compile.

I have also done even more house cleaning and I think I have removed all unused resources from the application now.

Anyway, try Milestone 1.2 here: http://code.google.com/p/slidehome/downloads/detail?name=SlideHome%20-%20Milestone%201.2.apk&can=2&q=

Milestone 1.1

A slightly better version of Milestone 1.
I have added listeners for package intents. Thanks to Bradley Booms for giving me the link to the documentation. It did turn out that the sample home had this done so adding it was trivial, but I would have spent more time on it had I not known exactly what I was looking for.


 I have also cleaned up the view by removing the title, adding scroll-bars, and packing the grid from the top down. This last change makes it so that blank spaces show up on the last line rather then the first.


Next up is saving the application list to the bundle so that the app loads a bit faster, looks like it might take a bit as it is a ListArray of type ApplicationInfo, or objects that hold the application intents, titles and images. Anyway, I'll figure that out tomorrow.


Get the newest SlideHome here: http://code.google.com/p/slidehome/downloads/detail?name=SlideHome%20-%20Milestone%201.1.apk&can=2&q=#makechanges