#v1.14

I have just submitted the 1.14 update to Microsoft, so you should see it either on the 11th or the 14th, depending on how long it takes them to certify the update. The changes are below.

Changed:

Finalized night mode

Combined the Tumblr and Twitter tabs into one news tab

Added:

Added option to reset to default settings

Added landscape mode to the rest of the app

Added tumblr feed for news about the app, essentially integrates this blog into the app

Fixed:

Fixed a crash when resuming app (most common crash)

Aside from some coloring, the main page of the app hasn't changed since version 1 way back in 2011. I have decided to replace the Tumblr and Twitter headings with a combined News tab. This tab has the Tumblr feed, Twitter feed, and my blog feed for news about the app. I also added a filter at the top of the page for those of you who only want to view posts from a certain feed.

Some of you may be familiar with something that looks like this:

A few updates ago I added a landscape mode to the page views only. I had originally planned to roll out landscape mode to the entire app at that time, but I ran into problems with resizing portions of the interface, so I held off for a while. The next update (1.14) will have complete support for the landscape orientation.

To solve the problem I ended up actually removing the offending code completely when I merged the news feeds into one box. The main page should work very well in landscape now, however on other less used pages, such as the about page, I designed the interface to dynamically fill out the page when changing orientations. While this worked very well in my testing, it could have negative side effects on other screen resolutions (I tested with 800x480) found on phone such as the Lumia 920.

Or rather, crashes when unlocking the screen or resuming the app. Looking through the comments, I have noticed those of you who stated long ago that the app would sometimes crash when the phone locked, and I experienced the problem a few times myself. A few weeks ago (the 1.12 update I believe) I thought I had tracked down the bug and fixed it. I was testing the app and it seemed fine, thus I submitted the update, only later realizing the issue still existed.

Upon further inspection, I truly found the root of the problem - and it wasn't actually a bug in my code at all. When you lock your phone's screen or switch to a different app, the app goes into a sort of standby mode (tombstoned), where all of the memory of the app is stored but it is not doing anything. However, after a few minutes (not sure of the exact amount of time, but less than 5 minutes) the app is "dehydrated" by the operating system, which is to say the current state of the app is cleaned and removed from memory to free resources for whatever else needs to run. This sounds like a great idea - and it is - but the problem lies with loading the app back into memory when it needs to. It remembered what page the app was on, but none of the variables (page data, images, etc) had been loaded, causing the app to crash instantly. My solution to this problem is to reload all of the data the app needs when it is resumed.