Latest on the Android version from Southern Stars.
First, if your device now seems to redraw slowly:
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Originally Posted by Tim
I can reproduce this [slow redraw] problem, to some extent, on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0. It's not as bad for me as for you, but then we have different devices. First good news: it's not a bug, and there is an easy fix.
First the fix: go to Settings -> Solar System and change the limiting magnitude for solar system objects to something reasonable, like 15 or 18. (I mean, you can't see things fainter than that anyhow.)
The full story:
Here's what's happening. In SkySafari versions before 1.7.3, we internally treated all solar system objects with magnitudes > 20 as infinitely faint. Now, we don't - we actually try to draw everything up to the Solar System magnitude limit. And there are a ton of those faint little asteroids. So your Android is trying to draw a lot more faint asteroids than before. And it just can't keep up.
I do not see the same slowdown on any of my iOS devices. The same issue is there, but the graphics processors, and the iOS graphics pipeline, is just hands-down much faster than on comparrable Android devices.. This is simply a known a limitation of Android. You just have to draw fewer asteroids for it to keep up.
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Second, if you've got 1.7.3 working properly you don't need this one.
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Originally Posted by Bill
We think we understand the problem and will spin a 1.7.4 release later today. We really don't need any more chatter on the list telling us if it worked or didn't.
It seems to only affect certain versions of Android or certain versions of the Google Play app, we can't tell exactly which. It never happens on any of our devices so we didn't see it.
Have we mentioned lately how frustrating Android can be to program for? It is just not set up to handle the large databases we need.
Before the release, you can fix it by either:
1. Going to the Android Settings app, doing a "Force stop" and then a "Clear data" on SkySafari (you will be asked to download the data when you rerun).
2. Delete and re-install the app.
In either case your settings and observing lists will be preserved.
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