I’m happy to announce the StageCaller for Android alpha program - for those of you brave enough to run a pretty nasty and incomplete alpha on Android 4.0 (api 14) and higher, well… then you’re braver than me
Google Play handles alpha/beta pay apps as if they actually cost money - to my limited knowledge, it will look like they are charging you $10 for StageCaller, but they aren’t - yeah, its a little weird.
the goal for this alpha project is to get StageCaller for Android running as close to parity with the iOS version as possible - there are numerous things that just plain suck on Android and some features available in StageCaller for iOS may get dropped from Android. After we reach parity, well, then we start the open beta program to shakedown whatever crap is left before pushing to production.
what works:
Apple MIDI & OSC
downloading sounds from dropbox (google drive works as well, but the UI I’m using for accessing both is funky and needs to be rewritten)
creating basic actions
what doesn’t work (yet):
can’t stop actions via notification or device movement
emergency stop doesn’t work yet
backup/restore isn’t written yet
MIDI auto reconnect doesn’t work yet
OSC/MIDI probably don’t have network changes well yet
there’s more I’m sure, but it just depresses me to type it
I wrote my own MIDI and OSC libraries - both were written as proof of concept, but are fairly stable - neither is written for speed at this time, so latency will be higher with this alpha than under iOS
I wouldn’t use this alpha in production - but if you REALLY wanted to I certainly wouldn’t stop you.
anyway - I thank you all for your patience in how long it took me to get to this point. I’m hoping for a production level app before the end of this year.
NOTE:
there’s a problem with StageCaller-Android and OSX Sierra (10.12) MIDI - basically you can’t connect to (using Apple MIDI Setup) or communicate with an android device over MIDI if the screen turns off (backgrounded app) - there are workarounds for this issue:
add android device ip address to MIDI server /etc/hosts file
or
add the android device ip:port manually to the Apple Network MIDI directory
this problem only happens with MIDI on OSX 10.12 - I’m not entirely sure what Apple has changed but it may affect other non apple network midi devices as well…
well - theoretically it’s an automatic refund (assuming it ever gets charged - I never checked for myself)… if you don’t see something in 2 weeks we should probably say something to google
oddly enough, google has done a pretty good job with their private/public alpha/beta apps on google play - but their handling of public alpha pay apps is a little confusing
We’re using an android phone with the latest alpha, we’re going to use it in the show.
So far its been working great, we’re using OSC commands, just start and stop, but its been quite solid.
No heartbeat and running it on the theatres general network.
(about to change it to a closed LAN).
Its a CAT phone, don’t know what system.
But its working.
As an update, we switched over to a closed LAN but the Android phone didn’t like the non-internet network and refused to log on, so will run the show on the production network. Our only saving grace is that its a new theatre so presumably there aren’t too many people who are logged on and downloading movies.
Even so, the Android phone has been quite good. Its missed a couple of go’s and I’ve had to double fire a cue a few times, but its kept running fine.
I’ve released alpha21 today - major changes to how actions work.
Vibration actions now require a pattern to be created (which are hopefully fairly straightforward).
A new Call action now replaces the ‘swipe to stop’ concept - so now we actually have fake calls… You’ll have to create a ‘Caller’ to attach to the action, which is simply a name and a phone number.
I’m still screwing with the Call action, so I haven’t focused on what the final features will be - I assume I’ll allow the user to change the ringtone (at the moment I use whatever is currently set on the device) as well as add in some kind of contact photo. Currently call actions can be set to ring for X seconds and stop, as well as wait for Y seconds to hangup after the user answers the fake call (where X & Y are set by you in the action)
As always, documentation is sparse. I’ll try to post a demo with alpha21 in the next day, although I’m not sure how I’m going to do that.
crap - nevermind - there’s a data migration crash on alpha21… if you want to make it work you’ll have to delete the app and reinstall… working on a fix for alpha22
