The latest version of Encountr was published to Android Market on Thursday night at around 9pm.
Improvements
- Completely overhauled the way icons are downloaded, cached, and displayed. Encountr no longer makes you wait for the icons to finish downloading before allowing you to navigate, and it does a much better job of managing them and its memory afterward.
- It won’t crash as often. 2.29 and earlier versions were absolutely guaranteed to eventually run out of memory and crash. It was a given, and only a question of whether it happened in 30 seconds or 30 hours. That was the real reason why search results used to be limited to 64 guys at any one time — any more, and crashes soared.
- The 64-user result limit is history! You can now have up to 512 users in your search results (from guys view, hit menu->settings and scroll to the bottom).
- You can now embed clickable links in your profile and chats, so you can link to additional pictures, or whatever.
- You can now set a username and password that will someday be useful for associating your profile with a new Android phone. At the moment it doesn’t give any confirmation, but at some point over the next few days I’m going to upgrade the server code so it will at least send you a chat message if you successfully set it for future use.
- If you try to launch Encountr with NEITHER network/tower-based location nor GPS enabled, it will stop and tell you point blank that Encountr isn’t going to work unless you enable at least one of them. Versions prior to 2.29 just silently crashed unless you had network/tower-based location enabled.
- If you try to launch Encountr with ONLY gps enabled, it will politely whisper (via Toast) at you mentioning that you’ll really be happier if you enable network/tower-based location service too, because GPS doesn’t work well indoors. If you have a Samsung Galaxy, GPS doesn’t work well, period (even the Epic4G has indoor-GPS issues).
- If Encountr hits a network error on startup, it tells you and gives advice about how to fix it.
Quirks
- Recently-active guys have their thumbnails flanked by parallel vertical or horizontal blue lines instead of a blue rectangle. It’s a temporary hack so I could make it work and get it published before the holiday weekend. For now, it gets the job done.
- Setting a username and password on the profile page is optional, and isn’t directly useful right now. It has no feedback to let you know whether it succeeded or failed. This is something else I wanted to finish for this release, but ran out of time and decided it wasn’t worth holding up the pre-Labor Day release over. If it bothers you, just pretend the fields don’t exist and ignore them for now. Someday, the username and password will enable you to buy a new phone and instantly migrate your profile and chats to it… or use Encountr on somebody else’s phone, or from an Android tablet.
Bugs
- Don’t send a chat message to yourself by viewing your profile, clicking chat, and sending a message. If you do, you’ll get a “new chat” message that won’t go away until I do my next round of database maintenance and delete all the messages having the same user for sender and recipient. This will be fixed in the next release.
- Encountr has come a long way over the past 4 weeks and two releases, but it’s still intolerant of network failure, and will crash if it can’t reach the server. I’m going to practically beg you to disable wi-fi unless you live in a country where data isn’t free and nominally-unlimited, or you don’t have some urgent, compelling reason to use wi-fi. Why? It’s unreliable. Specifically, if you have wi-fi enabled at home, and you get into your car and drive away with Encountr running, it’s going to crash before you get to the end of the block because Android won’t give up on wi-fi until it’s failed catastrophically for 30-60 seconds. This doesn’t just affect Encountr… it affects everything that’s network based due to the way wi-fi works. Encountr just happens to handle it rather badly when it happens. This is one of the next things on the agenda to fix in the near future, but for now, you’ll be MUCH happier with Encountr if you just disable wi-fi.
- It’s not really a new bug, but try to avoid doing the following: touch the ‘Chats’ tab, then immediately navigate away from Encountr (by pressing home or back), or rotate the screen, while it’s “Updating Chats”. You can sometimes get it into a state where it will get stuck and effectively hang Encountr until you either reboot or kill it with a task killer. It’s also possible for this to happen if you rotate between portrait and landscape at the worst possible moment, but isn’t common. Other manifestations of this bug include a chat list with duplicate entries. This can also happen to the gallery view of nearby guys, but it’s less common, and usually happens only if you abort a data transfer during the FIRST request after launching Encountr after a reboot. v2.31 doesn’t fix the bug, but it spends a LOT less time in a vulnerable state than 2.29 did, so this bug shouldn’t appear very often now.
