The title says it all. As I don’t have time anymore for long detailed blog posts and it’s better if I give short but frequent updates all new stuff regarding SeriesGuide will be anounced on its Twitter account. For more information about SeriesGuide look here.
Latest SeriesGuide news on Twitter
posted July 20th, 2011New Overview in SeriesGuide 1.9.1
posted March 29th, 2011I got lots of suggestions for SeriesGuide the last months and I wanted to say thank you all!
So the last weeks I felt more unhappy about how long a process it was to get to the description of the next to-watch episode. Sure, you can quickly access those for upcoming episodes in Upcoming, but what if you re-watch a show and are in an early season (assuming ‘Only future episodes’ is disabled in settings). As re-watching is a major use-case of SeriesGuide there had something to be done. A comment got me thinking so after some time I came up (after some iterations) with the new Overview.
Overview
With Overview you can now see the details of the next episode by just clicking on a show. It also helps to leverage ‘Show Info’ which was previously hidden in the context menu of a show. Together with the ability to mark this episode watched (and show the following one afterwards in-screen) and the Share button Overview did get really neat ;).
New App icon
Additionally I finally had the time to change the app icon from the Oxygen icon to something more custom. And I have to say I really like the result with the green checkmark making the icon easy to spot.
One thing I might add as a note to myself: do longer testing! I rolled out three updates a day (not all just bugfixes). To a user I think it would made more sense to have these released as one. Sometimes it’s really hard to decide between pushing features fast and not bothering users with updates…
SeriesGuide on Honeycomb
posted March 7th, 2011So I started reading about the new stuff on Honeycomb on developer.android.com and really got interested in the Fragments and Loaders API, escpecially since this can be used on Android 1.6 and higher with a static library Google offers. However using fragments will require a lot of background work, e.g. porting the database to a ContentHandler…
As I know there are some SeriesGuide users on 3.0 right now (hello you lucky fools!) I did some basic optimizations recommended by Google, so the next point release would look a little nicer. See for yourself below. Two things have changed for Honeycomb users: the action bar is used and SeriesGuide is styled with the native Holo theme.
Make me that 3D Windows UI
posted February 13th, 2011Basically you have those curved 3D layers which you navigate on the z-axis (into/out of the screen) and side-ways (left/right). The video below gives a rough idea what I’m talking about:
Demonstrates the generic layout and animations. Especially in the beginning when a layer is moving towards you.
And here’s a sketch further exploring it based on the concept of files and folders. But as you see in the video above everything (mainly display functionality for pictures, video, text files, documents) could be transformed into those 3D layers.
Future me, if you read this: did you learn to use DirectX and did create this?
SeriesGuide 1.7
posted February 10th, 2011So finally there is a new version of SeriesGuide and it even includes more than I had planned originally. So first, as advertised there is the new app widget:
Important: do NOT move SeriesGuide to the SD card when using the widget.
By default (‘Show only future episodes’ is checked in settings) it shows the two soonest upcoming episodes. If you disabled ‘Show only future episodes’ it will show the two oldest episodes you have yet to watch.
Each show info now has an IMDB button which takes you – you guessed it – to the related IMDB page in your browser.
The button is more of a side-effect of a potential later ability to check-in shows/episodes with GetGlue, but there is nothing decided here yet.
Besides some small performance and interface improvements that’s about the most important stuff. However below are some additional screenshots to give hints to further changes.
Showing status if there are currently no unseen episodes.
If the season list says you watched all episodes of a season, now you really did.
Look at Android market, the new version will appear there soon.
SeriesGuide 1.5 aka “Holiday Edition”
posted December 24th, 2010Happy holidays everyone!
If you haven’t already noticed, SeriesGuide 1.5 is in market since… ahem, minutes :D. New things are (from the Change Log):
- Basic search functionality. Use your devices search key or the menu in SeriesGuide.
- Interface updates (e.g. new checkbox image, progress bar when updating all).
- Using Android Backup Service to backup settings (useful for reinstallation, change of device). This works on Android 2.2. and higher and only if it is/can be enabled on your device.
- Database Version 12 (created a fts table for efficient searching) (Backups from this version can not be imported in earlier versions)
- Fixed upgrade from database version 10 to 11 (Rating and image path got mixed)
As usual mail me through Android Market if there are any problems (I tested this version really long and hopefully caught all bugs).
SeriesGuide 1.4.10
posted December 9th, 2010So the next minor release is coming (after some other nice updates I didn’t blog about). It includes
- a new preference to control hiding of SeriesGuide images from your photo gallery. If you change this a reboot is necessary on most devices for the images to show up again in your gallery.
This was introduced because some users actually do like having the SeriesGuide images in their gallery.
- different determination of season and episode numbers, fixing some stupid mixups (e.g. ‘One Piece’). Just update affected shows. If you update other shows you might see some episode numbers changing, too. Mail me about any side-effects!
- Database Version 11 (Backups can not be imported in a SeriesGuide version with a lower database version), this happened to support the new season and episode numbers as well as shrinking the seasons table a bit to save storage space. I hope to optimize other data in the future, too.
- Auto-Backup of the database before a database upgrade (only!). There will for example be a new backup file named seriesguidedatabase_b4upgr after you upgraded to 1.4.10 (which has database version 11) in the seriesguidebackup folder on your SD card. This happens also if you import a backup which has a lower database version.
I hope to get 1.4.10 tested and to market soon. I’m a little busy with my studies, so sorry for the wait…
