last call for the Android release

[Dirk Hohndel]

Ha, it feels like I said this before. A couple of times.

Many of the issues that were found and reported at the last minute are now fixed and the first release will be better for it.
1.0.2(4.5.2.1062) is now in the Beta channel and unless we have another show stopper in the next 12 hours I intend to release this as our first product and announce it to the world. The final user manual is up. The store listing exists in English and German. If people wouldn't mind, Google suggests (based on their analysis of where we'd find interested users), that we should add French, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian to that list - and I think Spanish would be very useful, too. It's just a few sentences, so maybe those of you with the necessary skills could send translations for this part:

Short description (up to 80 chars):
Mobile version of the popular Subsurface dive log desktop application

Full description:
Subsurface is a free open source dive log application available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Subsurface-mobile allows you to access your dive log on your tablet or phone. Simply create a Cloud Storage account with the Subsurface desktop application, store your dive log in the cloud and then enter the same credentials in Subsurface-mobile.

Now you can easily see your dive lists and details, and quickly change those details on a mobile device. Subsurface-mobile lets you track GPS fixes during a dive trip and apply those to your dive list. You can also manually add new dives to a dive list.
 
While Subsurface-mobile does not currently allow downloading dive data directly from dive computers, a future version will provide that function as well.
 
Subsurface-mobile replaces the Subsurface companion app.

There is currently one oddity when using Subsurface-mobile on an Android device: the screen doesn't always scroll correctly when the keyboard is opened. Sometimes you have to close the keyboard to get to the lower part of the screen. We are working on a fix but didn't want to further delay the first release for this.

I have to say I'm extremely excited about this release. And I know that our friends in the Plasma team (especially Marco, Sebas, and Thomas), without whom we would have never gotten to this very impressive first release, are almost as excited as I am. This is the first release of a Kirigami based project that isn't part of Plasma - and I believe this will be the first Kirigami application in the Google Play store.

At this point I don't know how much interest we'll create outside the developer community. It could be a few dozen users (OK, I doubt that), or it could be thousands. It seems like this would be something that a lot of people would want - but I have proven a remarkably bad judge of what people want.

Once I have the announcement written, please share it in local forums and help promote this app. We put so much effort in it, it would be a shame not to let as many people as possible know about it.

My special thanks goes to Marco, Sebastian and Thomas. Their help and support has been amazing. From the user interaction design to the implementation of the first draft of the UI to the amazing work on Kirigami. Just one example of just how supportive they have been: When I finally realized that I couldn't figure out what the issue was with the delete / undo notification not working, I looked for Marco on IRC at 9pm local time on a Friday evening. Got immediate help, great support narrowing down the offending commit on the Subsurface side and then within a few minutes a fix on the Kirigami side that addressed the issue that I inadvertently triggered with what I thought would be a harmless change. This just exemplifies the cooperation and support that we have gotten from the Plasma team - I cannot praise them enough for their help and I hope that many others will reach out and say thank you.

The stats for this release are mostly meaningless. This mixes desktop and mobile changes, has a bunch of small cleanups in the middle, but hey, I always post those, so I'll post them today:

$ git shortlog -s -n v4.5.0..
   532  Dirk Hohndel
   230  Tomaz Canabrava
    98  Sebastian Kügler
    58  Lubomir I. Ivanov
    35  Miika Turkia
    22  Robert Helling
    20  Joakim Bygdell
    17  Linus Torvalds
    15  Rick Walsh
    11  Jan Mulder
    10  Guido Lerch
     9  Willem Ferguson
     8  Anton Lundin
     8  K. \"pestophagous\" Heller
     8  Marco Martin
     7  Henrik Brautaset Aronsen
     7  Salvador Cuñat
     4  Giorgio Marzano
     4  Stephen Hemminger
     3  Wendie Fisher
     2  krisalpha
     2  Guillaume GARDET
     2  Sergey Starosek
     2  Pedro Neves
     1  Gaetan Bisson
     1  Rex Dieter
     1  Ash Kamel
     1  Steve

As always my thanks goes to everyone on this list - and to all of you who tested, provided feedback, helped track down bugs, translated and all that.

(which reminds me - yes, translation is still on the todo list - after the initial release... Subsurface came out in English only as well :-> )

So let's hope nothing bad shows up so I don't need to re-do this email and re-do the stats.

Thanks everyone. I'm having a blast.

What's next? Well, I have an idea or two:

- localization
- iOS version
- 4.5.4 of the desktop version
- work towards 4.6 (statistics, finish the dive site management, rewrite of the manual dive edit, etc)

The work is going to become a lot more, that's for sure.

/D
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