April fools in December?

I was hacking away last night to rewrite Wallpaper Slideshow, and I needed to reference a java file in the Android source code. I noticed the file had changed, and that a new commit had been made. The Gingerbread was done baking before the timer went off, which it did this morning with Andy Rubin's big announcement.

So on my lunch break today I thought I would upgrade to the latest SDK and spoil my dinner with some tasty new Google treats. The good thing is my applications work wonderfully, the bad thing is, this must be some kind of joke.

Here is a screenshot of the upcoming Wallpaper Slideshow settings screen in Froyo (spoiler alert, be warned):



Looks normal, and has looked the same since API level 3. Now Google hired some big name user interface designers for Gingerbread to give it a new fresh look, so I was pretty excited to try it in action. Imagine then my shock and dismay when I was greeted with the following screen:



Yes folks, THIS IS GINGERBREAD. And that doesn't even show the worst of it, the buttons, the menus, the widgets and my personal least favorite, the progress bar, all look extremely horrible. Overall the entire OS has a flat, black, pixelated and blurry look to it. It is just unbelievable in the worst sense of the word.

I can only hope that this is not a final release, that the emulator lacks some required hardware video acceleration, or Google is just playing a joke on us because this is outright atrocious. Now I will reserve full judgement until I have a Nexus S in my hand, but if this is the way it's intended to look, be ready for some well deserved ridicule from the community.

UPDATE:

Ok, so my emulator was using MDPI resources instead of HDPI. When increasing the pixel density it actually looks 100x better. I'm still not really a fan of the widgets, or the transparent options menu, but it's no where as bad as I thought initially... at least not for HDPI. I hope lower resolutions won't suffer the same pixelation as we see in the emulator, but I do look forward to the day when I can test this out on a real device.

Getting your album art to show on Android

Cover Art Downloader for Android on AppBrain

Cover Art Downloader (Donate) for Android on AppBrain

Traditionally, getting your album art to show on Android has been a complicated task. If your audio tracks weren't initially tagged with embedded album art or a specially named file inside the albums folder before being loaded onto the device, there was no hope of getting the artwork to be displayed. Furthermore, embedded album art on Android is only supported for MP3's, so if your music is in another format like OGG, FLAC, MP4 or AAC, then the file naming scheme for your device was the only option. To make matters worse, the filename required is inconsistent across devices. For instance if you are running stock Android, the file needs to be named AlbumArt.jpg or if your phone is running HTC Sense, it's a cryptic filename like ~hTC_The Name of My Album.jpg.

The only way to make album art show up after initially loading it onto the device was to mount the phone to a computer with USB, copy the files back over with embedded album art or copy the album art image with the correct naming convention to the sd card and store it in the proper location. Then go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All > Media Storage and press Clear data, then reboot your phone. This also would delete your playlists, video thumbnails, picture metadata, etc., and the reboot would take several minutes as it rebuilds the database. What a pain!

Normally in a case like this, you would turn to the Android Market for solutions. However, until recently the only options on the market were poorly rated expensive apps. Then, Album Art Grabber Free hit the market. This grabber worked for about 75-80% of my collection, but it has a slow interface (it takes 4 clicks to set just one cover); doesn't work with various artist releases, singles or rarities; only searches for album art by artist name; doesn't allow custom artwork to be used; doesn't save album art to sd card so it can be detected by the media scanner after a wipe; doesn't embed artwork into id3 tags; artwork won't show up in 3rd party players that don't read the metadata from Androids internal database; it has a clear album art option but it [works] only on the entire collection, you cant clear a single album, but worse when you click the button, absolutely nothing happens; it is ad supported and it nags at you to donate. There are even reports of the album art not even persisting across a reboot and no way to save album art between data wipes or moving your sd card to another device, so if you frequently flash a new rom or replace your phone you will not have your album art until you download it again.

So this prompted me to write my own, Cover Art Downloader. Version 1.0 was released free on the Android Market on November 1, followed by a quick bug fix release on November 2. I am proud to announce that version 1.2 is now available and is the quickest, easiest and most accurate way to import album artwork on any device running Android 1.6 or higher.

This release features:

* 1-Click download of artwork for any individual album
* Batch download to grab all missing artwork automatically
* Can filter albums list to make albums easier to find on larger collections
* Manual searching for unknown artwork by Artist, Album or any other term
* Can set custom artwork from Gallery (SD Card)
* Option to save album art to sd card in proper location with the proper name for your device so your artwork will still be there if you wipe your phone, get a new phone or flash a new rom
* Allows clearing of artwork from individual albums

Additionally, a donate version ($1.99) is available on the market with these additional features:

* Embed album art to id3 tags
* Automatically scan for and download artwork when new albums are detected on the device

Now, you can quickly download all of your missing album artwork, have it work in 3rd party players and persist across device reboots, factory resets or replacements.

Cover Art Downloader for Android on AppBrain