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mobile multiply v3.3.0

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I am coming in late in updating this app to conform to the new targetSDKversion requirements, but better late than never. Again, like I did with the Australian Daily Prayer app, I ran this code through AI and it make a nice changes in running a little more efficiently. It made me an abstracted base fragment, that I could use for most of the pages, so each fragment came down to about 20 lines. I also got it to update the code so it didn’t have anything depreciated in it.

One other main update is that the audio and pdf links now work again. The links were pointing back to the orginal multiply site when it was hosted on amazon, but since then they have moved, and now those links are gone. They also are not on their new site. However, I did have copies of them and they are now hosting on this site (nothing is ever lost on the internet).

This new update is on the play store (currently under their review process) and this website

Australian Daily Prayer v3.3.0

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The time had come for this app to be updated to the next SDK version. In doing this, I also set out to improve the code using AI, by asking it how things could be improved and how to remove depreciated code. In general, AI was helpful, it did get a few things wrong, but it did understand how to update the code to newer libraries and even made one or two functions a little more efficent.

Just before the app was ready to go live, I then got a Pixel 9 and noticed that it handles the system nav bar differently than the Pixel 5. There was like this little nav colour bar at the bottom as well as the top system bar is bigger to make room for the camera, but this can hover over the content underneath stretching your work space. I wanted the whole space on the top the change with the theme colour, but in the end, it is now just grey – on the Pixel 5 it is black, as AI wasn’t very helpful in colouring these, and it may have something to do with the fragment lifecycle, so when I know what colour I want, the bars are already built.

Overall, the code is updated to all current libraries and so hopefully it will be a bit more stable and/or quicker.

You can get this on the play store, or the APK can be downloaded from this site.

Fixed the SSL Certification issue

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During the week of the 12th of May, my SSL certificate expired as my hoster was unable to automatically renew it. This was due to a new limitation intdocuced Let’s Encrypt, which now only offers 200 new certs a week. This turned into requesting a new SSL cert a bit of a lottery.

The flow-on effect of having an expired certificate meant that the Australian Daily Prayer app couldn’t pull the daily feed, and my policy URLs on the Google Play Store were inaccessable. Without a working link to a data policy page, Google threatened to pull some more of my apps.

Because I am cheap, I didn’t want to buy a certificate. However, most free services don’t allow you to create a wildcard cert and only allowed one domain (or subdomain) to be registered. In the short term I rolled a SSL Cert for dailyprayer.ampers.x10.mx just so the app at least worked.

Last week, I was between jobs, so I sat down to try and sove this issue once and for all. During my investigation, I discovered a problem with my hosting provider: they control the .well-known/acme-challenge folder which meant I couldn’t upload anything to that directory to verify ownership of my site. After reporting this to the hoster, they suggested that using a DNS challeng might be best option. However, as I pointed out, the reason I wasn’t already doing that was because I didn’t have access to their DNS manager, leaving me stuck between a rock and hard place. In the end, one staff member gave me access to their DNS manager, so I could then roll my own SSL Certificate (using win-amce).

This really wasn’t my hosters fault, as the problem initally was caused by Let’s Encrypt and their new limitation. I did want to get this issue sovled before I started work again, but it was only last night, one my first day that I was able to get everything back up and working again.

OpenSpritz Bible is back

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It had been four years since I have last touched this app, and since then it got pulled from the Play Store for being too old and not having the right policy checks. Since leaning on ChatGPT went well for me recently, I turned to getting this app back up to date. It now doesn’t have any depreciated code and even some redundant references have been removed.

I did upload the source to my open-source branch on Bitbucket which was a bit of a problem as it had my ESV API key in it, so I have pulled that. Sorry (not that anyone ever used it).

I know this app probably doesn’t even need to exits. I am not sure reading the Bible as fast as possible is a good thing; reading with looking at all the text around you probably helps bring everything into context. But still, if you want to read all of Philippians in three and half minutes you can with this app.

Update has been pushed to the Play Store and this site.

Who Will Be King? Colour update

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Most nights with my boys we use a book for a devotion with some activates. The last book we used came with the Who Will Be King booklet. In that I noticed that they had updated the colours of the Gospel presentation, along with their website.

Yesterday, while on the mend from a cold, I thought I might try and see how good ChatGPT is for coding. So, using that to help I update the targetSDK for this app to be the latest and added in some colour changes for each panel of the Gospel presentation. ChatGPT was pretty good in helping, although some of the code it gave me was a little off. Overall I think it saved me a bunch of time. I also used it to help me integrate git into Android Studio, and linking it to my bitbucket repos which was something I wanted to do, but never got round to doing it. It’s authentication method was a lot easier to set up than bitbucket’s own SourceTree, so I probably won’t be using that any more.

It has been about five years since I have last updated this app, so on the store front I had to agree with a whole bunch of other polices, but now it should work on newer phones. I also updated the images to be a bit better quality and fixed a view setting in the night mode.

The new update is waiting for approval on the Google Play store but can be downloaded on this website.

Australian Daily Prayer now with Catechism

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The time had come again for my apps to get updated to the latest minimal standard (targetSDK 34). While I was updating these libraries, I found an Australian Anglican Catechism called What We Believe (pdf). This seems to have been publish in 1985 and was brought about due to something passed in general synod in 1977 asking for a revised catechism for our context.

This is now a new menu item in the app. This new page then displays the whole 45 questions and answers. I know that it could be displayed better (likewise the 39 Articles) so that its not one very long page, but for now it is a start.

This new update had been pushed to the app store and should be updated soon. You can also download the APK from this site.

Fitbit watch face: Spectrum Plus

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For my birthday I got a Fitbit Sense at a very good price as the Sense 2 had just come out. The default watch face that comes with the Sense is called Spectrum which shows your steps, heart rate and sleep score. As your stats increase so does the graph. The issue I had with this was that your sleep score only changed on a daily basis, and your heart rate graph never really rose very high up the graph. And I am a bit of a stats nerd so I like the faces that show you lots of data.

On the Sense, you can only have five watch faces, but then I found one called FitFace which links to its own watch face platform, and on that one “watch face”, you can save another five from FitFace. This platform does have limited stats, ie you can’t pull sleep score, o2 levels or calendar items, but it does have a really easy-to-use interface that allows anyone to make their own watch face with really no need for coding. So on this platform, I decided to “improve” the Spectrum watch face by displaying steps, heart rate, active minutes and calories burned. Throughout the day, these graphs will grow more than the original set of metrics.

Basically, each graph is a square image that adjusts the Y coordinates and the rotation value based on the percentage of the current stat compared with the daily goal. I had to brush off some trigonometry using Sin to work this out. I also has to put in a condition to stop rotating once the goal was met for the day, otherwise, the square would rotate too much and break the illusion of the graph being a triangle.

There are some imperfections (a right angle line) in each of the graphs, this is a known bug on FitFace when your rotate images bigger than 200px. You can view this face here (I have no idea why their test data has the heart rate up at 200). I think the colours and transparency may need to be tweaked a bit, but it works alright for now.

Australian Daily Prayer themes update

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In preparing to be ordained, one of the tasks I need to do is to follow the Australian Anglican morning and evening prayers and lectionary for 30 days and reflect on this experience. In doing this, it means I have been using my app every day, and what has annoyed me during this process is there was one colour in the tabs that didn’t update correctly with the season (see pic below). So I have fixed that

While I was adjusting the theme, I also remembered someone at my church who used this app and they were having big display issues because they had night mode set. So I have also updated the night theme to make it a bit better, mainly on the About screen and the 39 Articles screen. This hasn’t been extensively tested, but it seems to work…

I have also updated the libraries and set the target SDK to be version 33, which should hopefully mean everything is more stable, or at least up todate.

This update should be pushed to the play store, and the APK can be downloaded from this site. (I have kinda given up on the Amazon store.)

Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up (again)

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For the last two weeks, all my ampers sites have been down, along with the Australian Daily Prayer app. This was caused at my hosters end, where they had two major server failures and then they had to manually restore everyone’s account.

I don’t pay for hosting, so on one level, I am grateful that they put in the effort in restoring all my data, even though they don’t get anything out of it.

This is the second major outage my site has experienced this year, the previous one was over SSL certs. I do hope this isn’t going to be a trend form my hosters.

Anyway, everything seems to be up and running again, thank you for your patience.

Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up

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About two or three weeks ago my website SSL certificate expired, which caused a “Not secure” warning to be displayed on all my sites and it also broke the Australian Daily Prayer app.

It tuned out that my free hosters had an issue with their LetsEncrypt process, so I tried a few things to get everything up and running again. I got a 90 day SSL cert from zerossl.com. This allowed my main site ampers.x10.mx to work. But that didn’t solve my Daily Prayer app issues or my subdomains.

I then tried to find a free wildcard SSL service (I found three different ones), but all of those required you to have access to enter a DNS TXT (entry which my hoster didn’t allow) or to place a file in a folder called /.well-known/acme-challenge. I found that I couldn’t place anything in the /acme-challenge folder as I would always get a 404. Again this was a setting on my hosters end.

Today my hosters got their LetsEncrypt process up and running again, which means I also got my subdomains and app back up and running.

Sorry to everyone for the downtime. I do this stuff as a hobby and because I am cheap I try not to pay for hosting or SSL certificates.