For something that started as a gift for j4s0n and a as newbie learning project for Android, developing the Grid Clock Widget has proven to be more work that originally assumed. Yet more issues will need to be addressed (and just as we have just started on a different app--not a widget, so the new project will hopefully have less "quirks" to work around).
We have recently been made aware of yet some more issues with the Grid Clock Widget. Apparently it doesn't update aftering rebooting on some HTC devices, and we also tried the widget on the Android virtual machine to find, to our dismay, our 2x2 widget being scrunched into a 1x1 cell space :(.
Rebooty may = No Updatey (some HTC devices)
A comment on the Android market (thanks for letting us know, although we prefer if bugs are reported here) indicates that on the user's rooted Droid Eris, the widget doesn't update after rebooting.
I had noticed that on slower devices, after rebooting it may take a few seconds to do the first update [I imagine this is due to the number of services trying to start at once which we can't really do anything about... we'll just patiently wait in line until our service gets some CPU time], but I don't think this is the issue as it seems from the comment the widget doesn't update at all.
After some research, we *think* this is an HTC (rom) problem that affects some devices where on shut down, the system deletes the widgets (and thus their ids which are associated to the configuration settings for each widget instance) and then on reboot, sends an update message with new widget ids [see What is the Sprint Hero AppWidget problem? -- even though this is for the HERO, there are other messages with similiar issues on other HTC devices].
The problems with this are:
- We ignore widget ids that aren't configured yet, assuming that either:
- you are still in the configuration screen
OR - you had "cancelled" out of the config screen because you have changed your mind and don't want a widget
OR - we may be receiving "ghost" widget ids [ids to widgets that have been removed or were cancelled]
- We don't know what the original settings were since we have deleted them in shut down when we received the delete message. Even if we didn't delete them though, we wouldn't know what the old widget's id was.
We are trying to figure out a work around for this, but as we don't have any devices that this has been as problems on, we don't know how fast we'll be able to solve this.
If you are having this problem on your device, please report it and if you would like to help test proposed solutions, that would appreciated too--just mention it in your message that you would like to help.
Grid Clock Widget may not get a 2x2 cell space (on VM or perhaps on tablets)
I don't know if this a problem in our manifest file, but we ran Android x86 in VirtualBox and our widget as well as a number of other 2x2 widgets we tested ended up only getting a 1x1 cell space.
We had never tested it in Android x86, so it was surprise to see this. We will working on *hopefully* fixing this since I wonder if this is how it would be on Android tablets (devices with like 7" screens)...
We will probably also add a way for you to control the target rendering size [pixels], since as of v1.0.2d, this is the way the widget renders (it tries to render currently at ~40% of the screen size), but
this target size may not be good for all devices, so we'll add a way for you to override it. This will address rendering issues if update v1.0.2d didn't fix it on your device and/or if you use a Home screen manager
that allows you to change the Home screen grid size (#cells) and you wish to change the cell size that it uses.