Can't see any page animations in GOOGLE TV ViewFlipper - android

I have an application that uses the ViewFlipper and the built in animation for PageIn and PageOut and I don't see any animations occurring on my GOOGE TV. Phones and tablets all work, but animations are not showing on my GOOGLE TV logitech box or Sony GOOGLE TV box.
My app is a photo/video slideshow photo book type viewer, so we're using the resources of the device, but still have no issues on the phone. I'm running a sony and a logitech and same results.
The same code base works perfectly on Honeycomb and the phone. Has anyone else seen very jerky performance in your apps that do a ton of Bitmap decoding and usage?

Turns out that Hardware Acceleration isn't enabled in the current builds of Honeycomb for Google TV. That is the cause of the issue.

The sample code http://www.warriorpoint.com/blog/2009/05/26/android-switching-screens-in-an-activity-with-animations-using-viewflipper/ shows Page in/out animation on Sony devices. Are you doing something different on your side?

It seems that the animations on GTV need some time to warm up before they're ready to perform smoothly. Try putting a small delay at the beginning of your animation.
android:startOffset="1500"
It will kill your responsiveness, but that's acceptable for our purposes because we're using it during an automatic slideshow.

Been working on a similar project on GoogleTV and it is now open-source:
https://github.com/elsewhat/com.elsewhat.android.slideshow
I use Gallery as the key component, but had performance problems on large screens with GoogleTV and the "swipe" transition Gallery uses. Been in touch with people from GoogleTV product management, and we were unable to find a solution for the root cause.
Ended up with combining the Gallery with a ViewAnimator to fake a fade-out/fade-in effect and performance is on longer an issue.

Related

Google VR + Unity = tracking stuttering / jittering / choppy

Launching GVRDemo scene using Unity5.4.2f2-GVR13 installation package I'm experiencing unsteady tracking on my Samsung Galaxy S7. As you can see on an attached video it's not caused by low frame rate nor any of my code since the only thing I've changed in the scene is switching the cubeRoom object with a textured sphere object which better visualises the issue:
https://youtu.be/_NRQNbtdpuI
It doesn't matter if I change the quality setting from Fantastic to Fastest.
As you can see the frame rate doesn't drop around the stuttering moments, so it's not about the CPU/GPU performance
As I test the Google Street View app for example, there's no such issue – is it because it's been written natively for Android?
On the other hand I've noticed games like VR Fantasy with tracking system behaving differently – more smoothly due to the delay in the reaction time regarding the device's movement (looks nice, but causes nausea after 5 seconds). This makes me believe there is an issue with Google VR tracking.
Is anyone experiencing the same thing? What might be the reason for it?
I am also testing a simple VR app made with Unity (5.6b9), and i'm finding that Android performance is rather poor. This is the case on cheap phones (Moto G, $150) as well as fancy phones (Nexus 5X, Asus ZenFone 3) and even expensive phones (Samsung S6).
I'm particularly puzzled by how poor the performance of a VERY simple VR app made with unity is (empty scene, a cube and a sphere, no special lighting, single pass rendering...). The Samsung S6 performes very well with native GearVR apps, or photos/videos. All the phones perform very well with things like street view or youtube.
The same unity app running on iOS outperformer all the androids by a wide margin.
Are there some tricks we're not aware of for getting performance out of android?
I'm using Unity5.4.2f2-GVR13 too, and I think it's just random.
Charging up your phone and controller, and rebooting the phone seems to help a lot.

Html5 Canvas game - black screen on Android devices after browser is run on the background

as per title, I've made this html5 canvas game by using the toolkit for Createjs with Flash.
It works fine on iPad and iPhone, but my QA tester found a very strange bug on Android: if you hide the browser (not close it, but simply send it on background), when you reopen it the game will either freeze or show a black screen, depending if it's in landscape/portrait mode.
I've uploaded a short version of the game - there is only the main menu, but that should be enough to test the bug - at the following link:
http://upload.id.net/view/zip/52d5d18c9f0a188b
Can anybody please help me with this, as I'm totally oblivious to why this is happening..?
I don't have an android device to test it myself, so there's that, too :(
Try to upload the game first (not running from phone memory card) and see if the problem persist. I'm not sure about this but i strongly believe that it has something to do with security in chrome. Good luck

Is there a way to show animated gif in Safari Mobile on Android?

I have a web application, not a native Android app, and the animated gif we use as a loading icon doesn't show its animation. I've browsed other sites and it seems that no animated gifs work in Safari mobile on Android, but I've been unable to find a documented confirmation that this is the case. Does anyone know why the android browser doesn't show animated gifs? Is there a workaround for this? I've seen lots of topics about showing animation in a WebView in a native app, but none for straight web apps. Do I have to create the image with css animation?
Thanks very much!
Android uses webkit which is the underlying engine from Safari, not Safari itself.
Historically it has not supported animated GIFs due to the way the graphics are composited, however they can be optionally enabled by the user under the advanced settings of the browser on some more recent devices. That probably does not make them useful to you.
For wide compatibility with various android versions you would probably be better off with a javascript or css animation (not sure if the later works all the way back through the earliest releases).
After running tests with a project I'm working on, I can say that:
gifs display beautifully on iOS devices (I'm testing on an iPhone4 running iOS6 and gifs run smoothly. I have tested on newer devices as well...it only gets better!)
gifs display pretty badly on android (I'm testing on Galaxy S3 running android 4.1). Its even better to display a flat image, the gif animation lags a lot).

is it possible to display animated gif image in emulator Using phoneGap

im using phonegap frame work in android,my problem is animated gif image is not working in emulator.In browser it's working fine.my question is animated images are support to phonegap are not?
I just tested this on both a device and an emulator - and, good news, it works on the device, but doesn't in the emulator - only shows the first frame. Both are at 2.3.3, and this discussion (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3422) suggests that trying on 2.2 may solve the problem, so you can try that.
If you can afford it, I'd recomment testing on the device - it is much faster too, so makes life easier.

How to determine if an Android device has a touchscreen?

I'm spending considerable time in making my UI to work with keyboard input only. But in the end I'm not sure whether I can rely on the assumption that Android devices all have touch screens.
Is there a way to determine if an Android device has a touch screen?
You should research the existing devices and read the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) and decide for yourself.
I have spent some considerable time trying to figure out this problem for myself. The posters above are correct that Android already powers some non-touch devices and will power Google TV in the near future, but as it currently stands, the CDD specifically requires that ALL Android devices MUST have a touchscreen.
Basically, the Android Compatibility program was created to hedge against the sort of fragmentation issues you're worrying about now. It lists a bunch of requirements, and if a device does not meet those requirements, it does not get access to Android Market. These requirements include a touchscreen, wireless communication, bluetooth, a camera, and much more.
If you research those tablets and netbooks, you will find that not a single one carries the Android Market. Augen recently tried to pull a fast one with their new GENTOUCH 78 tablet, but had to rescind their claims that the tablet would carry Android Market after being shot down by the Android Compatibility Team.
So, if you are only distributing your app through Android Market, you have nothing to worry about until Google changes the CDD. But if you'd like to offer your app on other app stores or as a direct download, then you'll have to worry about your key mode navigation issues.
If it's any consolation, I have found that many, many apps have the exact same problem; they are impossible to use without a touchscreen. Many of them also have serious issues with focus and the soft keyboard. Sometimes the keyboard stays up when it should be hidden. Sometimes you can't get the keyboard to pop up no matter how many times you click on an EditText. IMO, the Android framework does not handle these things all that well.
Given all that, it will certainly be interesting to see how Google TV fits into all this. Will they update the CDD to be compatible with their set-top boxes? Will they use a different SDK and CDD for Google TV implementations? Will they ignore the Compatibility Program altogether when it comes to Google TV? Your guess is as good as mine.
Update:
It seems that someone at Google has finally come forward and admitted that Android is not ready to run on a tablet:
http://phandroid.com/2010/09/10/shocker-google-says-android-not-meant-for-tablets-in-its-current-state/
To me, this says that Google was not prepared for the accelerated adoption of the Android OS and has not adequately roadmapped the future of the platform. Supporting screens larger than 480x800 is barely possible, and Samsung was only able to do it by working closely with Google on the Galaxy Tab. So I'm not so sure we need to worry about non-touchscreen devices in the near future. They'll be here eventually, I'm sure, but when they do arrive we may see a separate app market just for those, or some altered filtering scheme on the existing market, a new CDD, who knows.
To me, this says that Google is still playing it by ear, and we'll just have to do the same.
All the phones so far have touch screens, but there is no promise that they must.
However there are lots of netbooks, notebooks, and soon to be TVs that have no touch screen.
However these devices have mice. From what I've seen, the mouse input gets pumped through the touch system so MouseDown is ACTION_DOWN, etc... (Don't know about right click though)
Are you targetting just the phones? Android is appearing on many devices including TV's I've no idea if new libs will be released to isolate parts of the devices from each other, but if you want a broader audience I'd suggest keeping the keyboard input available if you are
Google TV (GTV) is the most popular Android notouch device (as of the time this answer is composed). However, there are several devices that will call for notouch renderings if you have "notouch" resources (e.g. a directory like res/layout-notouch/ )
To accommodate notouch devices, made sure that focus will cause a visual selection indicator, and (for GTV) that keystroke listeners are in place for the directional-pad center button. Using default widgets and themes will often accomplish much of this automatically. If you make your own buttons, you need background 9-patches for focused and focused+pressed.
Running on a GTV is a good test environment to make sure that notouch works well, and GTV has an emulator now, though it runs only on Linux/x86.

Categories

Resources