Decaf, Amazon EC2 Client

[Jurg van Vliet]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Vincent <lusis.org@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 6:24 AM
Subject: Decaf, Amazon EC2 Client
To: de...@9apps.net

Guys. I love the app but you really need to get a handle on the resource usage. I uninstalled the app the first time because it was eating up memory and battery. The comments suggested this had changed but it had not.

Running in demo mode the application continues to restart itself whenever I wake the phone, swap connections or pretty much do anything.  I understand the nature of the application but I simply expect an apparently to stay shut down especially when I'm only running in demo mode. It'll gladly reinstall when that issue gets fixed.

It's an awesome utility but right now I need it to only run when I ask it to run.

[Jurg]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jurg van Vliet <ju...@9apps.net>
Date: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:21 AM
Subject: Re: Decaf, Amazon EC2 Client
To: John Vincent <lusi...@gmail.com>
Cc: fpaga...@gmail.com

hi john,

thanks for your feedback. we like it you like it, but we are evidently
not very enthusiastic about these issues.

we use system intents like connectivity change and boot/restart to
start stop our repeating alarm (for checking watches on instances.) we
didn't find a way to dynamically register to receive these events.

but, we can stop listening to connectivity changes, it only means that
decaf will continue to check when there is no connectivity. we could
listen to AIRPLANE mode to see if we need to stop checking or not.
(but in that case, we start again as well.)

the boot/restart was necessary when we still had a service for
watching instances. I now realize a repeating alarm might survive
shutting down the phone.

we are pretty sure decaf doesn't DO much. so there shouldn't be a
battery problem, only a problem on phone resources like memory. we
tried to completely shutdown after the intent has been handled. but i
think that is not enough.

i am also going to have a look at how gmail/email handle checking for
mail (if i can find the source.) these apps always do work, and i
hardly ever see them 'alive'.

thanks,
jurg.

do you mind if i post your feedback to the google group? (http://
groups.google.com/group/decaf-support)

[Jurg]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Vincent <lusi...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 2:09 PM
Subject: Re: Decaf, Amazon EC2 Client

To: Jurg van Vliet <ju...@9apps.net>
Cc: fpaga...@gmail.com

Jurg,

Thanks for the response so quickly. Feel free to post my message where
need be. I wasn't in front of my machine when I sent it or I would
have posted it to the proper place.

I somewhat understand the intent system. I will admit that I was being
hyperattentive to the running processes because I always am after
installing a new package. I'm can give decaf another shot and see if I
can watch and see if it was shutting itself down after various state
changes.

I guess what I would like to see is a mode whereby decaf doesn't
respond to any intents unless I flag it as such (I.e. wifi only for
instance). I don't know if this is even possible to change your
behaviour dynamically like that or if the intents you want to respond
to must be statically set permanently. I would obviously expect that
running as a widget means I want you to do whatever you can to get the
data but in my case I installed decaf, loaded the demo setup and never
installed the widget.

[Jurg van Vliet]

in the end it wasn't too difficult to find a solution, and i this is satisfactory. (of course android has facilities for this, but it keeps amazing me how many of these features are hidden but from a framework perspective well designed.)

decaf operates in 2 modes, normal mode and sort of 'demo' mode. actually you can look at decaf as if operating in 2 other modes, account-validated or account-not-validated. the demo mode is a subset of the account-not-validated mode. when the account is not validated we set decaf to read-only.

it turns out that you can tell the phone you want to enable/disable certain components of your application. you can for example disable your widget, or your widget updater. we used this feature to disable widget updater, sms receiver and on alarm receiver. now, when decaf is read-only the intents for connectivity changes, boot, package install/uninstall, widget updates are all ignored. decaf will not be started other than if the the user wishes.

if decaf is in read/write state it behaves as before.

(we need to finish implementing one more feature today, to have decaf on small screens as well. then we'll push a new update.)