Saturday, 29 December 2012

Llama's having a quick break

Llama's off the market for now while I investigate a pain-in-the-butt problem involving silent mode, vibrate mode and the dreaded System Volume level.

Changing the system volume in Jelly Bean now changes the ringer volume. I can't find anywhere in the Android SDK that documents this, which is rather infuriating. Feel free to look through here and see if you can spot it.

Changing the ringer volume (or the system volume since they are now related) will flick a silent phone to vibrate, even if the new ringer volume is zero. So everyone that previously had a fairly sensible 'set system volumes to silent' may now find your phone will vibrate.

Fun fun fun.

Why were previous versions of Llama behaving? Because it was naive, and literally dumped out the values from a profile to the AudioManager. Now Llama tries to be slightly smarter about setting the values... e.g. if you choose a Silent ringer mode, it will set the volumes to zero, rather than the values you picked from the profile. However, this exacerbates the problem described above.


I think it's fixed in this version, but no doubt there's some manufacturer out there that has tweaked their version of Android to have a system volume. Ideally, I'd want to hide the system volume from the profile editor if you're running Jelly Bean, but since there's now no way of knowing if a device supports system volumes or not it will have to stay :'(

I'll put this version on the market tomorrow morning, when I can fire-fight any more stupid that may arise.



It'd be awesome if you could let me know if the above version works for you... ideally activating a loud, silent and vibrating profile, and letting me know if the volume icons changes to the correct one. Cheers!