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Topics - Remy Lebeau

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MSAgent for Android / New Product!
« on: September 22, 2014, 02:08:12 am »
Can you imagine Merlin, Genie, and all of the other MSAgent characters flying around on an Android device? Well, now you can, because I have begun work on an MSAgent engine for Android :)

I have been able to get Merlin to "appear" in a test app running in an Android emulator.  And on modern Android screen resolutions, he doesn't take up a whole lot of screen space, which is a plus, so he might actually look good on phones and tablets alike :)

I have some basic pieces working:

  • load ACS file from device/SDCard
  • an asynchronous request queue (TODO: canceling requests, syncing requests between multiple characters)
  • playing animations (TODO: stopping/interrupting animations)
  • show/hide, w/ state animations
  • moving the Character around the screen, either with touch input (dragging) or in code, w/ state animations
  • gesturing, w/ state animations

Although it is possible to display a Character on top of the app's UI, and even on top of Android screens when the app is in the background, I did come across some odd quirks in managing the Character's top-level window.  This might limit MSAgent to just in-app usages.  At least the character would stay on top of the app UI (good for tutorials and such).  Will keep experimenting with it.

I did start work on TextToSpeech output, but discovered some shortcomings with Android's TTS framework, the most important of which is that there are no notifications of when individual words/phonemes are spoken.  That means words in the speech balloon cannot be highlighted while the character is talking (unless the text is broken up into individual words and feed into the TTS engine one at a time, which is likely to cause lag).  That also means that proper mouth overlays cannot be displayed.  This is a big issue for user experience.  Not sure if these will be solvable without resorting to third-party solutions.

I am trying to make it as functional as possible.  I'm not really expecting this to be a full implementation like on Windows, just due to some shortcomings of Android and differences between how Android and Windows work in general.  But it is an interesting challenge to see how far I can take it, it gets me back into playing with MSAgent, and it helps further my learning of Android app development.

I will try to put together a little video soon to show what I have so far.

When I have an Android library that is viable outside of my development environment, I will probably put it up on SourceForge or GitHub or something.

2
Announcements / Status Update
« on: September 22, 2014, 01:50:32 am »
I want to apologize for my tardiness in recent years.  With lifestyle changes (having kids, increased workloads at my day job, etc), I just have not had much free time to work on my projects.  I pick at them here and there when I can.

For my fellow AceMoney users:

1) My LSFinance app for Blackberry was put on hold in mid 2012.  Not from a lack of interest, mind you.  To this day, I still want an AceMoney-compatible app for my Blackberry phone.  There were multiple factors involved:

  • lack of time
  • with the introduction of AMJ encryption in AceMoney 4.20.1, my app was no longer able to access AceMoney data.  I have technical specs from MechCAD on how the encryption works, but was not able to get it working in my app yet.
  • after seeing the direction MechCAD took with their AceMoney Receipts app, I decided my app was taking the wrong design approach trying to access MMW/AMJ files directly.  But I did not have time to work on a redesign yet.
  • BlackBerry now supports Android, so I hope that AceMoney Receipts works on BlackBerry 10 devices (which I do not have yet).  If it does, that would make my app obsolete before it can be released, unless I only target pre-BB10 devices.

2) I started a new AceMoney Configuration Editor tool awhile back ago.  It allows editing AceMoney settings that are not accessible within the main AceMoney UI, especially the ability to add/remove/edit Bank OFX info and custom Currencies.  It has been slowly coming along, but it has been a few months since I last worked on it.  The ability to edit Bank OFX info in particular repeatedly comes up in the AceMoney forums, so it would be a handy feature to have.  I have been waiting for some technical specs from MechCAD that were promised to me a few years ago and never delivered, which is the primary reason this tool has not been released yet.

For my fellow MSAgent users:

Ever since I wrote and published my MSAgent Character format spec sheet in 2003 (last updated in 2009), it has always been my goal to bring MSAgent to other platforms.  Last week, as a proof of concept, I started working on something towards that goal - an MSAgent engine for Android.  Progress has been good so far, I have some basic functionality working (loading an ACS file, playing animations, moving and gesturing).  I intend to keep working on it, and hopefully release a public library and API that Android developers can use in their apps.

That is it for now.

Until next time...

3
Announcements / Loss of data!
« on: May 24, 2010, 05:37:16 pm »
I'm writing with some bad news.  :'(

Due to a recent hard drive failure followed by a corrupted backup server, most of my data files are now inaccessible to me, possibly even lost forever.  This includes all of my Lebeau Software projects, except for one - my LSFinance for Blackberry app, which I started working on after the hard drive failed but before the backup was corrupted.  Which means that unless I can recover at least a good portion of my source files, or start over from scratch, what is currently available on my website will likely be all that will be available for the forseeable future.

I am still working on data recovery, but it is slow due to budget and time constraints.  I did get a few quotes from professional recovery services, like DriveSavers and OnTrack, but they want approx $800-$1000 for the job, which is a bit out of my price range right now.

I will let you know how things go.

4
Announcements / New product!
« on: January 31, 2010, 11:59:28 am »
I am pleased to announce that I am beginning development of a new software application - LSFinance for Blackberry. This is a personal finance program targeted exclusively for the Blackberry smartphone platform. The first release of LSFinance will support importing/exporting financial data from AceMoney, a popular personal finance program developed by MechCAD Software LLC. Later releases will support popular open formats, such as QIF and OFX.

5
LSFinance / New product!
« on: January 31, 2010, 11:59:00 am »
I am pleased to announce that I am beginning development of a new software application - LSFinance for Blackberry. This is a personal finance program targeted exclusively for the Blackberry smartphone platform. The first release of LSFinance will support importing/exporting financial data from AceMoney, a popular personal finance program developed by MechCAD Software LLC. Later releases will support popular open formats, such as QIF and OFX.

6
TMSAgent / TMSAgent v2.2 beta released
« on: January 31, 2010, 11:52:55 am »
The new v2.2 beta of my TMSAgent VCL component is now available for download on my website:

http://msagent.lebeausoftware.org

This release includes new package files for C++Builder 2010. Sorry, no package files are available for C++Builder 2009 yet, as my 2009 setup was lost awhile back ago and I have not had a chance to reinstall it yet.

7
Announcements / New Forums created!
« on: June 12, 2009, 02:14:02 am »
Lebeau Software is proud to present new discussion forums! LS customers can now discuss products with each other, help each other with tech support, etc.

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