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Scibblenauts again.
Finally completed every single challenge once and it was some journey, from riding a bicycle past an angry bear, using black holes to rid myself of planes, creating zombies/vampires and all manor of creature to advanced roping of flying dinosaurs, assisting aliens and giants to wiping out rabid woodland creatures to driving at 88 mph while being stuck by lightning, the list goes on and on.
so have I completed the game ? well I unlocked all the unlockable characters (bar one) and all the music and all the backgrounds, but no.
There are 220 levels but to 'complete' the game and unlock the final character you have to play each level FOUR times.
Once to show you can complete it and three times in a row each time without reusing anything used in previous successful runs (you can use what items were summoned in the original completion run, but only once).
So technically you only have to create three lots of different objects even though you play the level four times.
So, for some of the levels I have got 'Gold star' for completing them three different ways but for others just completing in once was hard work.
Three months on I have put down scribblenauts and moved on to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, thank you Jane !!

FYI the following happened some weeks ago ...
I have been pretty heavy on Orange since I so its nice to be able to give them some positive feedback.
after getting the latest DEXT update(automatically from Motorola) the screen intermittently would go very bright. a better way of describing the fault is high contrast. the phone has no contrast settings and the brightness controls made almost no difference.
after searching online and finding nothing but a hard reset

1. Holding the Camera button while turning on your phone,

2. When prompted hit the Volume-Down rocker button to go into Recovery Mode.

3. After you get into Recovery Mode,

4. Press ALT+L to reset, then Menu+Back to reboot.

and that failing, I rang orange. none of the menu items mention a faulty phone but eventually I did get through to someone. we did a factory reset to no avail and she arranged for a new phone to be delivered within 24hrs and for the old one to be picked up, no fuss no muss.
And that is what happened, now I just need to rebuild all my settings and install my favourite apps.

The about screen was very easy to add

import android.app.AlertDialog;



private void AboutDialog()

{

    new AlertDialog.Builder(this)

    .setTitle("About Binary Watch")

    .setIcon(R.drawable.watch_dialog_icon_32x32)

    .setMessage("Binary Watch is my homage to the Samui Moon\n\nHere you can also show the seconds and the calculations.\n\nI could have used a photo but decided instead to render a faxsimlie using blender www.blender.org and www.gimp.org.\n\n Now when someone asks me how to read my watch I just show them my phone :)\n\nwww.jumpstation.co.uk ")

    .setPositiveButton("OK",

    new DialogInterface.OnClickListener()

    {

        public void onClick(DialogInterface dialoginterface, int i)

        {

        }

    })

    .show();

}

Then on to rotation, which sounds really simple, registers some kind of event handler that fires on rotation of the phone. NO!
When the phone is rotated (and you allow the screen to re-orientate) your application is killed and re-launched with a different screen resolution(i.e. landscape instead of portrait).

if (getResources().getConfiguration().orientation == Configuration.ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE)

{

    setContentView(R.layout.main_landscape);

} else if (getResources().getConfiguration().orientation == Configuration.ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT)

{

    setContentView(R.layout.main_portrait);

}

Which worked fine, but lost all the users settings.
Next time I will look at how state is saved between transitions and even new instances.

It has been a while since my last post regarding Android and the Binary watch application. This was due to a Wedding, a holiday and getting a new job.
So next up in my requirements was icons.
There are a lot of icons included in the standard Android OS for developers to make immediate use of (note the differences in Android releases), but none quite matched my iconography needs.
In the Android icon guidelines are details about size, layout, colour and I did try to follow them.
The results were UGLY so a quick play in gimp got me some nice bitmaps of the right size but that were not grey scale.

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