Re: 12+ clicks to run app with new service-based model

[Rui Marques]

I agree with you, I have seen at least other developer with the same "complain".

On Thursday, 16 August 2012 20:11:53 UTC+1, Clayton Grassick wrote:

Hello, 

I'm the developer of a water quality tracking app which uses OpenCV to count bacterial colonies. The new service-based distribution model in 2.4.2 has a fatal drawback for my app: it requires the user to perform 12-16 clicks the first time they run the app, several of which are non-obvious! For an average user, this is a showstopper and means that many people will be too frustrated or lost to ever see the app in action.

12 clicks is not an exageration: Yes, Install OpenCV Manager, Accept&Download, <Home, Back doesn't work, Open is wrong>, <Run App again>, <Ok to restart app>, <run app again>, <yes>, Install <cryptic named app>, Accept&Download, <home>, <run app again>. If the app is not on the home page, as a newly installed app is likely not to be, the count goes up.

While I appreciate the benefits of the new model for sophisticated users, please, please, don't deprecate the old static library way. As far as my users know, my app has nothing to do with OpenCV, so it's a lot of hoops to jump through to simply run it.

Thanks, 

Clayton Grassick

[Kirill Kornyakov]

Thank you for the analysis, you are absolutely right, the number of clicks is the cost function that should be minimized. And the OpenCV team is working in this direction, we're targeting to the less than 5. OpenCV Manager is in beta-status, so the production code should be switched to the new model probably with the next major OpenCV 2.5 release (or may be 2.4.4). In the meantime you can use older distributions of the library, because if your application works OK with an older version, you can stay with it forever. And if you follow discussions here, you should know that you can use so-called static initialization.

[Putria Febriana]

same as i complain about that issue

[Kirill Kornyakov]

OK, let's reiterate over this :) With OpenCV 2.4.3 only 4 clicks are needed: Yes, Install OpenCV Manager, Accept&Download, Back. You can try it with 15 puzzle from Google Play. Please be sure that you don't have OpenCV stuff installed:

adb uninstall org.opencv.samples.puzzle15
adb uninstall org.opencv.engine
adb uninstall org.opencv.lib_v24_tegra3      # these packages are useless now!
adb uninstall org.opencv.lib_v24_armv7a_neon # these packages are useless now!
adb uninstall org.opencv.lib_v24_armv7a      # these packages are useless now!
adb uninstall org.opencv.lib_v24_armv5       # these packages are useless now!
adb uninstall org.opencv.lib_v24_x86         # these packages are useless now!

If you still think that 4 clicks is too much, then you need to use "static initialization", or even link OpenCV statically. But this approach has it own drawbacks: your application is fat, it doesn't get latest optimizations without your intervention, and so on. It seems that 4 clicks is the absolute minimum, and this is the price we have to pay. Another strategy could be to use static initialization in the first version of you application, and if you see that users are happy and regularly installing updates, you can switch to OpenCV Manager in one of later versions. You can inform them about the benefits of the new model, it is also possible that they are already using OpenCV Manager! =)

Thanks,
Kirill