Greed 2

I've had a pretty busy couple of months working on an Android application for a big company. It's due on the Market sometime next month. It's going to be a pretty cool application, I think. I'm kind of excited about it. It uses JNI to talk to a number of C/C++ libraries, and does some fairly interesting things. I think people in its intended audience are going to have a lot of fun with it. It's probably the first project I've worked on for a paying client or employer where the design specification mentions "fun" as one of the requirements!

I've been very busy as a result of this work, and unable to devote much time to Greed. But in the last couple of weeks, I've had some time to do something I've wanted to do for a while: Rewrite Greed.

Over the last year, Greed turned into a somewhat complicated beast. It was one of the first Android applications I wrote, and one of its main underpinnings was a library I had written very early for doing asynchronous requests (e.g. pulling items from RSS feeds, etc.). It was a pretty simple library. Too simple, actually. Applications using it had to do a lot of work in order to use it, and they would end up being more complex than they need to be. A Google Reader client isn't totally simple anyway, so using this library resulted in Greed getting big and unwieldy (not to mention slow, and a memory hog). On top of that, I had piled a lot of features on in a relative hurry, continuing to build on the complicated-library approach I mentioned earlier (which didn't help matters). Finally, I had essentially copied Greed Lite's source code to a new project and diverged from it in order to make Greed Full. Any maintenance I did on Greed Lite would have to be copied to Greed Full, which tended to discourage my doing working on both of them.

I'm happy to report that all of that has changed. Once I decided to take the leap and rewrite Greed, it only took about 8 evenings to get to where I was after 2 months the first time around. I reused the UI layouts, and the underlying API. Everything in the "app" layer is brand new. That part of the code is now about 1/5 the size (or smaller) of the original Greed Lite. It's faster, a little nicer-looking, and is going to be easier to work on.

Anyway, I would like to ask for testers. If anyone is interested in giving Greed Lite, please feel free to do so, and let me know what you think. I need to know how it runs on all possible Android phones. I've tested it on a G1 running cyanogenmod, and it's running well. I hope to try it on a Droid and a Nexus One in the next couple of weeks. I've run it on a phone I'm using that's not available on the market yet (also appearing sometime soon, probably in May), and it's really quick on that.

Bear in mind, there are still plenty of things to work on. For example, the notifications right now are unconditionally notifying on all updated feeds, instead of only the ones you specify. This is the next item on the list. If you'd like to contribute items to the list, I'd be glad to hear them.