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Author: ampers

Christian. Husband. Father. Son. Canberran.

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.

OpenSpritz Bible v2.0.0

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This is a bit of a novelty app. The gimmick is that you can read quickly without having the ordeal of moving your eyes. In essence, a single word flys at you and your brain kinda absorbers the text.

This app had been broken for some time (maybe 3 years?) as the source where I was getting the Bible text went under. In the past, there was a bit of a Bible download management system where you could download and chose different versions and then the app would parse an XML file. With this update it is just using the ESV, essentially repeating code I used in the last update in the Inductive Bible Study app.

There are limited with the using the ESV, you can only pull down 500 verses at a time, whereas in the past you could read a whole book at once as all the content was downloaded locally. There ESV can let me download an XML of their Bible, but that will cost me about $100 a year. Due to the novelty of the app, not having a big audience and this app is free, I don’t think it is worth it.

Update has been pushed to the Play Store and this site. I’ve pretty much given up on Amazon as their app console process is painful.

Australian Daily Prayer v3.0.0

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For a little while, the Australian Daily Prayer app wouldn’t update the service content if you changed the date. The card at the top would display the right day and saint/festival, but the morning and evening tabs would still be displaying the current date. This bug turned out to be a relativity simple fix by changing the FragmentPagerAdapter to be FragmentStatePagerAdapter. However, I was already deep into readjusting the whole app to be running on the AndriodX libraries, which meant this fix got rolled up into a bigger update.

From the users perspective, not much will appear different (maybe the menu), but under the hood hopefully it will work smoother on newer phones (the last update was from October 2019).

There may be other bugs in regards to the content of this app, ie some days a Psalm doesn’t appear, or the readings might be a bit off, etc… That is more to do with the website it is pulling from, and not necessarily the app itself. I run that website, so the issue is still on me, but those content bugs may not have been fixed in this update.

Integration to the Inductive Bible Study app isn’t working, I think it may have to do with that app receiving requests from this app (which I probably forgot about it in the last major update). This may be a feature I will put back in.

You can get this update from the portfolio page and Play Store.

Inductive Bible Study v2.0.0

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This is a long time coming, but I have finally updated the Inductive Bible Study app. A while back the bible API broke which means the app pretty much was useless. I looked into a few options to pull the Bible, but no free service really offered a major Bible translation, except for the ESV. So I am now only pulling the ESV text into this app.

I also tried updating this app to the newer coding standards. While the user will not really see any differences, I pretty much re-wrote this app to use fragments and not make each screen a new activity. This did take a bit of relearning, but they say it is better. Code is reused, but it did take me a little to get my head around each UI screen becoming a subpart of the main activity java class. Calling functions and knowing your code context was an initial hurdle. But I kinda got there in the end. There may still be some things I have forgotten. I did remember to update for the native android night mode

I have updated the play store, the portfolio page, and am trying again to use the Amazon dev console (we will see if it works in a few days).

Two Ways To Live – Dark theme

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Last year when I posted the new update to Two Ways To Live the framework or skeleton that I used as a base had a section that made it work with the dark theme feature that comes with Andriod 10. I didn’t notice and hadn’t played with that before, and so when I pushed that update live it caused a few people massive reading issues as the app just wasn’t suited to be read in this mode.

I didn’t realise this was a problem till I saw that on the app store I received a few comments telling me about this issue.

I have now fixed up the dark theme section of the app so that it will work ok under the dark theme setting. This also means that my other recent updates to Who Will Be King? and mobile multiply will also need to be adjusted.

mobile multiply v3.0.0

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I started this update in November when I got a new wind of energy with the Two Ways To Live 2.0.0 update. This project took me much longer as I had to pretty much covert the whole Multiply book to be native in the strings.xml file. I then had to do it all over again for the Spanish version. It did, however, give me lots of time to listen to the T4G talks from 2020 while I was converting this app.

I have done a bit of testing on this, but there is a chance that there could be links broken, or starting or finishing letters to paragraphs missing, italics not in the original (especially in the Spanis) things like that. Please let me know if you do find any errors like this.

I am glad that this app is finally done before the year officially kicks off. I still use this app when meeting with senior high school kids. This will probably be my 7th year using it.

This new update is on the play store and this website – I’ve given up on Amazon as their review process is annoying.