Sorry it’s been so long since we posted an update. Here’s what’s going on…

Lightning Bug 2.9.4

Last weekend we released some patches to Lightning Bug with the following audio upgrades:

- Users with devices running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) or greater will now benefit from a totally new audio component for eliminating playback gaps. This new component has much improved stability and provides totally clean playback when the app is moved to the background! If you are using Android 4.1 or higher, Lightning Bug will automatically use the new component as long as you have ‘Lightning Bug Audio’ enabled under clock settings.

- Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of complaints from users, especially those on Ice Cream Sandwich devices, of the audio system crashing. So we’ve also made some tweaks and bug fixes to the original audio component for devices running Android 2.3 – 4.0. These changes will also apply automatically.

As always, if you experience any problems with Lightning Bug, audio or otherwise, please contact support AT lightningbug.me.

New App

It’s been a long time since we released a major update! I want to assure you that the new app is under development and looking absolutely *fantastic*! So I think it will definitely be worth the wait. It’s still a little premature to announce a release date, but we will be sending out invitations to beta test the new app soon! Beta seats are limited, but if you would like to participate please contact support AT lightningbug.me!

- Chris

Since the release of Jelly Bean we’ve gotten quite a few reports of Lightning Bug crashing on startup for some Jelly Bean devices. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been able to reproduce the issue on our Jelly Bean test devices, so it looked like we were just gonna have to live with it.

But then yesterday we were contacted by a user in Germany named Ralph who was gracious enough to run Lightning Bug while his Jelly Bean phone was hooked up to the Android SDK debugger tool. This is an advanced debugging step, and one we would usually try to avoid, but it totally paid off. Ralph sent us the system log from his debugging session and voilà. So, thanks to Ralph the issue is now patched and 2.9.1 has been released to the Play store!

On another note, a lot of you have been asking about the status of 3.0. Just wanted to let you all know that development is in full swing and the new app is looking and sounding fantastic! There’s no release date yet, but should be ready in another month or so.

We can’t thank you enough for your patience, but thanks all the same!

- Chris

State Azure is a UK-based electronica artist who’s been putting out some killer ambiance lately. If you’ve noticed his name listed as a contributor to Lightning Bug, its because he’s also been sending us some great audio samples and loops to use in Lightning Bug since the 2.0 release. And we’re totally stoked to tell you that State Azure has now published both an album and an EP online!
Reminisce EP
Outlines

Check out his tunes and give him a shout!

Cubicle Pi: Converging

After I first listened to Outlines I emailed State Azure to extend some well-earned congratulations … and to ask if he’d be so kind to let us feature his new album in Lightning Bug. Good news, he said yes! So even though we are now officially at work on Lightning Big 3.0, I squeezed in some time for a new scene in the Cubicle Pi Pack that features one of my favorite tracks, Converging.

Hope you like it!

*If you are running our most recent version of Lighting Bug, the Plugin Manager will automatically update the new plugins for you within about two weeks. If you just can’t wait, then you can update the plugins manually by doing the following:
- Start Lightning Bug and ensure you are in Plugin Manager mode
- Click the menu button or tap the main screen to bring up the menu
- Click the Circle with a Triangle in the middle (second column, second option down)
- Click “Check for Plugin-In Updates”
- It will then refresh the Plugins and bring you to the main Plug-In Manager screen
- Click Cubicle Pi and it will bring start the download

So you’ve installed our latest update, 2.9, and *still* hear audio skipping when you use Lightning Bug. Please check *each* of the following in the order they appear:
- Are you using the latest version of Lightning Bug?
Launch Lightning Bug and pay attention to the app’s splash screen. The current version number is displayed to the bottom right of the app’s title. It should read “v2.9″. If not, go to the Android Market and install 2.9.

- Is Lightning Bug Audio enabled?
Launch Lightning Bug and go to the Settings screen. You can get there by tapping the screen anywhere, then tapping the Clock icon (it should be second down in the first column). Lightning Bug Audio is the first settings option, make sure it is Checked.

- Does the audio always skip or only when Lightning Bug is in the background?
When Lightning Bug is in the foreground, that is you can actually see it, are you still hearing skips and gaps? Or do you only hear it when you send Lightning Bug to the background and do something else on your device like check email? In the case of the former, it seems your device is not supported by our app at this time. In the case of the latter, this is a known issue with our Lightning Bug Audio solution and actually relates to another issue in the Android OS. Bad news for you either way, but we ask that you wait until Android publishes its own fix for the setLooping audio bug at the root of this.

OK That’s Nice, But What’s Going On, This Should Be Simple!

First, I want you to know from me personally that we’ve done everything I think we reasonably can on this. We’ve been wrestling with this issue for more than 6 months now, that’s a short lifetime in app years. We contracted outside expertise, an option we’re very lucky to have because all of you have been so good to us. We even mounted a small, arguably successful, grassroots campaign to pressure Android into addressing the problem from their end.

Second, what exactly is the problem? Since its Gingerbread release Android has had a confirmed problem with playing compressed audio samples in continuous loops. Here’s a previous post on the subject.

Third, why do we keep saying its fixed when you continue to have issues? That’s a tricky one, but the main point is that our solution, we call it Lightning Bug Audio, requires a level of coding that is inherently difficult to 100% guarantee without testing it ourselves on all possible Android devices. But doing so is totally cost prohibitive at the moment. Currently we have 5 Android devices in our test bed: Motorola Droid X, Motorola Droid X2, HTC Nexus One, Samsung Nexus Galaxy, and a Motorola Xoom. Each release is tested on all devices. So if you’re still having skipping problems despite your device being represented in our test bed, please check and double check your settings.

Thanks so much for using Lightning Bug and taking an interest!

Chris

2.9 Release
-Lightning Bug Audio now supports Ice Cream Sandwich
-Now available in Korean
-A few bug fixes

2.9 will also be our last release before Lightning Bug 3.0!
3.0 Preview
-Totally New UI
-Multiple Alarms + Wake to Scene
-Save Your Own Scenes
-Add Your Own Audio
-Playlists + Crossfading
-And of course…lots of new content!

No release date has been set, but it is going to ROCK! Check back for updates!

We’ve been actively campaigning Google to fix the notorious setLooping bug for a few weeks now and today I got a great surprise in my inbox. The official bug’s status has been updated to Future Release! So it seems we’ll be seeing an official fix soon! Of course, we still haven’t seen an official, written statement from anyone at Android, but that’s ok as long as it gets fixed.

And thanks again to Sleepy Time for joining with us on this!

In our previous release we included a custom audio system to address a known Android bug that has been causing “gaps” in looped audio since Android Gingerbread. We called our solution “Lightning Bug Audio” and thought we were finally clear to start working on all the new features and content you’ve been asking for. Unfortunately, we are now aware that there are still two significant audio issues:

- If you send Lightning Bug to the background with the custom audio system enabled, you will hear a lot of audio distortion when doing anything that frequently updates the screen such as scrolling through your emails or even just swiping from one home screen panel to another. We believe this issue is due to yet another OS bug in which Android is ignoring the priority of Lightning Bug’s audio output. We’re not sure yet though and will continue to investigate.

- If you are using a device running Ice Cream Sandwich, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, not only is the original Android audio bug still present, but Lightning Bug Audio will not work at all! To this end, we have disabled Lightning Bug Audio in 2.8.1 to avoid more confusion.

We have gotten more complaints about this audio issue than all other Lightning Bug issues combined! We want it fixed just as much as you, and we will continue to investigate possible work-arounds when we can. However, the time to move on is here. We will no longer put off Lightning Bug 3 development to address this issue.

In the meantime, we need your help in letting Google know that this issue needs to be addressed in a future release of Android. An official bug report has already been made and can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=18756

PLEASE, visit this link and click the star icon in the top-left of the screen. Stars are equivalent to votes. The more votes this issue gets, the more attention it will get from Google. It’s that simple.

To that end, we have also added a one-time startup dialog to Lightning Bug that will either ask you to star the bug report or send a tweet to @AndroidDev asking them to address the bug report.

And we’re very happy to say that we have actually launched this ‘Call to Action’ in conjunction with the creators of Sleepy Time which features the same dialog as of a release today. While Lightning Bug and Sleepy Time are technically competitors, getting this bug fixed is clearly in both of our interests. So a big THANKS to Chuck from Sleepy Time for working together with us on this!

Now with that out of the way! 2.8.1 also addresses the following:

App appears zoomed out and is unusable on Ice Cream Sandwich
Many of you using the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, emailed us about this issue. While we did test Lightning Bug in the official Android emulator for Ice Cream Sandwich, we had not had the opportunity to test it out on a real world device. After purchasing a Galaxy Nexus, we confirmed and fixed the issue. (It was due to a display setting we made several releases ago)

Clock not displaying correctly on tablet devices
Somehow this one got by us while we tested release 2.8, but the issue is related to a graphics hardware acceleration option available as of Android Honeycomb. We enabled this option in 2.8 hoping it would improve the user experience on large screen devices. Unfortunately, it turns out there is an Android issue when enabling this graphics option in combination with large fonts. Lightning Bug’s clock uses such large fonts when in landscape mode on tablets. When the graphics option is enabled and large fonts are encountered the result is no text showing up. Fortunately, the solution was easy. We just disabled the graphics option!

In our 2.8 release we introduce a feature called ‘Lightning Bug Audio’. Lighting Bug Audio is a custom audio system we built just for Lightning Bug that effectively fixes the gap\skipping issue many of you noticed as of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). As great as it is, we decided to make Lightning Bug Audio optional and ‘off’ by default because its still so new. If you’re experiencing the gap\skipping issue though, here’s how to turn it on:
- Launch Lightning Bug
- Tap the screen to bring up the main menu
- Tap the settings button (the clock icon)
- Lightning Bug Audio is the first option, tap it to enable it

*Lightning Bug Audio is only available on devices running Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) or higher. For more info on Lightning Bug Audio and why we created it there’s more later in this post.

A few more notable changes:

• All audio is now played through a priority background service. We’ve had complaints that Lightning Bug’s audio sometimes cuts out after a few minutes or hours. This is the fix!
• Many updates were made to make Lightning Bug more compatible with extra-large screen devices such as tablets and televisions.

Lightning Bug 2.8 is available now in the Android Market!

More On Lightning Bug Audio
Since the release of Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) a few months ago we’ve been getting more and more complaints that sound samples in Lightning Bug were no longer looping smoothly. Instead there was suddenly a noticeable gap, or skip, when those samples looped back to their beginning. Needless to say this problem had a significant effect on Lightning Bug’s overall effectiveness and had us quite worried!

As we looked into the gap problem it became clear that the root cause was not coming from Lightning Bug itself but from some combination of device and Android version. Specifically, the problem only seemed to effect users with dual-core cpu devices running Android 2.3 or higher. That is, it looked like our problem was coming from a bug in Android’s media stack. And from there it also became clear that Lightning Bug wasn’t the only app being effected. Several popular apps we tested from the Android Market clearly had the same problem as us!

You would be right to be skeptical that the Android team would let a bug like this sit out in the wild for too long. However, a bug report on this issue was made several months ago on Android’s official bug site. To date, no one on the Android team has responded which may be due to the report not having many votes. So please go here and vote for the bug by starring it:
Issue 18756: StageFright – setLooping(true) leaves a noticeable gap in audio

It was also brought to our attention that this issue might not actually be in the common Android source code, but in the specific build of Android used by Motorola. So far we have only been able to test on dual-core Motorola devices so we can’t verify that it only effects Moto devices, however a bug report has also been made on Motorola’s site:
Issue on Moto hardware with MediaPlayer->setLooping(true)

We spent a lot of time looking for a work-around to this problem, but in the end we realized we’d need something more sophisticated. Lightning Bug Audio is a native audio interface we built to replace the standard media API available via the Android SDK. Its still very new of course, so please let us know if you continue to have audio issues while using it.

http://bluestacks.com/home.php

BlueStacks is only available for Windows as of now, but Mac support is coming soon. And better yet, we’ve tested Lighting Bug on BlueStacks and it works great! You may have to use BlueStack’s ‘Zoom’ feature to get Lightning Bug working 100% (once you have BlueStacks installed watch the tutorial video which covers the Zoom feature), but otherwise we didn’t see any issues.

Have at it!

Around the 9th of June some users began to notice that Lightning Bug was no longer able to download plugin content. Many of you emailed us about the issue and we quickly verified that, in fact, the server we used to host Lightning Bug’s plugin content was no longer online.

This began a long series of back and forth phone calls with out hosting provider. We wish we could say that our provider handled our server issue diligently. Unfortunately, we were repeatedly kept in the dark and even mislead as to the status of the plugin server. On the 12th, after 3 days of getting nowhere with our provider, we decided to setup a temporary server to host the plugin content until our issues were resolved. Late that night the temporary server went online and over the following 12 hours users were gradually able to access plugins again.

A day or so later our hosting provider finally got our server back online, however our server’s ‘image’ was corrupted to the point that it was no longer usable and would require a complete re-installation and re-configuration (at least another day or so of work on our end).

So, we decided to move Lightning Bug’s content to a new host that specializes in delivering the kind of content that Lightning Bug requires. This past Sunday night we cut-over to this new host. During the cut-over its possible some of you experienced a brief interruption in access to plugins, however it looks like everything has otherwise gone really well. The new host is a well-known, industry leading provider and we’re really excited to aquire their services.

As for our previous hosting provider, we thought a lot about whether or not to name them in this post. However, decided not to for a few reasons. First, it would not do much good outside some temporary venting. We think we’re all better off moving on and leaving this incident behind us minus the negative baggage. Second, we personally feel that it’s our responsibility, not our provider’s, to make sure our products work and that our users have a great experience. In this case, we should have had a backup server ready for a situation such as this and didn’t. That said, we now have a backup server in place and will always include redundancy in our plans going forward.*

Things are looking really good now, the new provider is humming, and we’re really excited about the new features coming in Lightning Bug 3.0!

So thanks so much for all your support and patience!

Chris

*There would, of course, be one benefit to naming our previous provider. That is, warning the developer and business communities about a provider that doesn’t really ‘provide’. To that end, feel free to email our support address and we’ll be happy to provide you with more details about our previous provider including their name and what services we were using.