Chaos 1.3

 I've uploaded a new version of Chaos to the Android Market. The only bug fix is the missing attack sound, but there are a couple of Android-specific cleanups in there. First off, I've now forced the game to run in landscape mode. Swapping between landscape and portrait was more of a tech demo than an actual useful feature. In addition, maybe people didn't realise you can rotate the screen to get a better view. I never used portrait mode anyway, it was too small. The second change is that you can now install the game to the SD card if you are running Android 2.2. I only have Android 1.6, so let me know if this works or fails spectacularly for you.

Spell select screen

For this release I upgraded my tools to the latest Android SDK, which is designed for Android 2.2. Prior to this upgrade I had assumed that I needed to use the old toolkits to compile for old versions of Android, I didn't realise that I could compile for 1.6 using the latest tools too. The explanation on the developers' documentation page is pretty confusing. As usual, looking for the API strings on Google Code Search turns up real world uses of the features and the correct implementation.

Speaking of confusing versioning, how about this tongue twister: the Android SDK is currently at API 8, revision 2. This is for Android 2.2. The SDK tools are at revision 7. These SDK tools are not tied to a version of Android, but API 7 is compatible with Android 2.1 in other places. In order to run on Android 1.6, you have to use "minSdkVersion=4", which corresponds to API 4. The latest version of the Android NDK is revision 4b. But the 4 here doesn't mean it only works with Android 1.6. In fact the NDK includes the libraries and header files for API versions 3, 4, 5 and 8, which correspond to Androids 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.2. Note that it doesn't include different headers, etc. for API levels 6 or 7.

And then you wonder why it took me so long to figure out how to use the latest SDK to compile for older versions of Android! :-P