Clanforge Slidescreen Plugin
I’ve finally done my first ever Android project, and by done, I mean got something working and usable, if not necessarily finished.
To lay some groundwork, I use an alternate home screen on my HTC Desire called Slidescreen by Larva Labs. Slidescreen is absolutely amazing, it completely changed how I use my phone, bring all the information I’m interested in into one easy to access place. I highly recommend it. Larva Labs are currently developing the next release of Slidescreen and with it comes some exciting new features, the most interesting and valuable of which is the ability to write plugins for Slidescreen to integrate whatever data you want into it. I’m running the beta for Slidescreen 2 and I’m loving it.
So, to get my feet wet with Android development, I thought I’d write a quick plugin for Slidescreen to pull information from Clanforge, Multiplay‘s customer interface for game server rentals. The plan was to load data over Clanforge’s API and display a list of your servers and their current status in Slidescreen so you can keep track of whether they are up or not, how many players are n them them, etc.
Over the course of this weekend, it came together quite well and I now have a basic version up and running. I built the entire thing using a combination of Eclipse, Geany, Vi and the command line android tools until I finally got more comfortable with using Eclipse exclusively. I hit some annoying problems, the main one being that the SVG icon parser in Slidescreen seems to be very, very fragile and for the first few times I tried getting the plugin to work, my SVG file from Inkscape made the plugin memory leak and throw NullPointerExceptions around like it was going out of style. Eventually I crafted a ‘working’ SVG, but for some reason it’s showing up invisible, so I need to figure out why. UPDATE: Didn’t figure out what about my SVG icon was breaking, but did manage to get a rudimentary SVG icon working for it which I knocked up using an online editor.
However, it’s up and running and here is the proof! Pics! Because it did happen!
The code is available here: https://github.com/darkliquid/ClanforgeSlidescreenPlugin