First release

I have a first release of the app on the Play store now:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lhsi.mcd

There is a rudimentary ability to crop images on it. After selecting an image to use for the card art, it sends it to the built in crop function of the Android camera to crop to the right size. There have been issues with this (as using the built in camera crop is not recommended as it is an undocumented feature), so there should be a fail safe where it will just use the image selected before cropping. My plan going forward is to find a cropping library and use that, but it will take a little bit longer to sort out.

Alpha Release

With some limited testing, I think I have gotten the app into a state where it is ready for an early release. I've got a small list of minor quirks I'd like to fix at some point, but nothing major. I have a longer list of functionality to add...

I think this link should allow access to it on the Play Store (but I've not released an Alpha app before so don't know the entire process):

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/lhsi.mcd

I think you have to be part of the Magic: The Gather community first

Latest fixes

This evening I fixed an issue whereby the transparency was lost for the mana cost symbols when putting them on cards, giving them an ugly white square background.

A quick Google found that transparency on gif image files wasn't supported as well in 4.4 or later. I saw one solution that involved changing certain pixel colours to transparent, but that seemed like a convoluted solution that had a side effect of making too much transparent.

My solution was to just convert all the images to on png, which does handle transparency OK. Even found a way to bulk convert them which was handy :-D

Image Share

After looking around on StackOverflow a couple of times, I finally got the ability to share an image file working.

This is the code snippet that works - saveCard is a File that I have just saved and checked that it exists():

Intent share = new Intent( Intent.ACTION_SEND );
share.setType( "image/jpeg" );
share.putExtra( Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, Uri.fromFile( saveCard ) );
startActivity( Intent.createChooser( share, "Share Image" ) );

This, on the other hand, is my previous code that wasn't working:

Intent share = new Intent( Intent.ACTION_SEND );
share.setType( "image/jpeg" );
share.putExtra( Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, saveCard.toUri() );
startActivity( Intent.createChooser( share, "Share Image" ) );

For some reason, the toUri method on File doesn't work in this case. In any case, I'm glad I got it fixed :-)

The Gathering

Some of my spare time is spent playing Magic: The Gathering, and some is spent making small Android apps for fun. For the Magic Card Designer, I have combined the two. This started mainly as a way to be able to create cards on my tablet for fun, but I have also learned a little about android development at the same time which is nice.

The app is still in the early stages at the moment, but I can get a card that at least somewhat looks like how it is supposed to, which is probably the most important bit.

I'll release it at some point, but I would like to get a minimum level of functionality first. What that minimum level is, I am not sure yet.