Android

An extremely generous user donated a Samsung Captivate (a.k.a. Galaxy S) phone for development! We now have the ability to test functionality on these phones, which is awesome. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that my initial testing didn’t show any problems at all. I’m able to transmit and receive just fine using a brand new Captivate. So, please use the forums (not the blog comments) to describe the problems you’re having and I’ll try to recreate the issues. Please include as much detail as possible about your phone so we can narrow down the problem.

Also include information about your server: Most importantly, what codec and sample rate is it using?

Update: It appears that Samsung phones cannot transmit in Speex 8kHz channels. We’ll get this fixed as soon as possible. It appears that Samsung’s minimum buffer size for audio is 4160 bytes of data, however a Ventrilo packet at 8khz is only 1920 bytes of data. Because the Samsung phone cannot provide a small enough buffer for audio data, it cannot transmit to servers that use really low codec rates. For now, the workaround is to ask your server administrator to change the code to a higher sample rate. Speex @16khz should work fine.

This will (hopefully) be the final alpha release before we go into the beta stage. 1.0alpha10 contains the following new fixes/functionality:

• Volume is set via a slider bar
• Multiple text-to-speech perferences for login/logout, channel join/leave, and page
• PTT button now displays current xmit status
• Added ability to login as “Server Admin”
• Hopefully fixed some issues on Android 1.5 regarding TTS (if you’re on 1.5, you should disable it all)
• Ability to set your comment and URL

New features in 1.0alpha6 include:

• The userlist on the Users tab is condensed to a single line
• The channel list on the Channels tab shows the channel hierarchy (does not obey server sorting method)
• The tabs, status bar, and title bar can be hidden
• Channel passwords are saved
• User volumes are saved
• Optional Text-To-Speech notifications when a user joins or leaves the server/channel
• The hardware camera button now functions as a Push-To-Talk button
• Option to prevent the phone from going to sleep
• Persistent notification icon

Mangler for Android 1.0alpha4 is now available on the Android Market. Unfortunately, someone forked our project and uploaded their fork to the Android Market without changing the namespace. Since our namespace (a.k.a. application name) was stolen, this means that we had to change our stuff, which in turn means that an Android device does not realize that it’s the same application. Because of this, you’ll need to remove any existing copy of Mangler on your phone and you will lose any servers that you’ve configured.

That said, 1.0alpha4 has the following fixes:

• Phones that don’t support native channel rates will automatically resample from supported phone sample rates to channel sample rates. This fixes issues for Samsung devices. (In the future, avoid Samsung devices… they seem to suck).
• Navigating away from Mangler (i.e. hitting the Home button) and coming back later should (may) now work. Warning: CyanogenMod AutoKiller will kill the service when you do this
• Some fixes for the chat tab

Mangler on the Android Market

We’ve released an updated alpha version of Mangler for Android with a few enhancements and more importantly some enhancements to help us with debugging. Let’s get this part out of the way first:

PRIVACY NOTICE

From this point forward, the alpha and beta versions of Mangler for Android will automatically (and without notification) send crash backtraces to our server. The backtrace data and your phone’s IP address will be stored on our servers and will be publicly available. If you do not wish to send this information, you will not be able to participate in the alpha/beta process without building the package yourself.

Other changes:

• You can set a volume for a user by long clicking their name in the user list
• You can set your transmit (outbound) volume by long clicking your own name in the user list
• Servers that automatically move you into a channel when you log in are now supported
• Some crashes on transmission attempt may have been fixed
• The transmit button is now push-to-talk instead of a toggle button

A list of known issues can be found in Trac.

UPDATE: The alpha2 version is kinda borked. The download page is reverted back to alpha1 and we’ll post alpha3 on Wednesday or Thursday (let’s all just pretend alpha2 didn’t happen, ok?)