Countdown to Beta … little help?
According to the Deacon project roadmap, tomorrow is supposed to be the day we release our Beta edition. The library, at least, is feature-complete for Beta at this point - mostly because we identified very few new features between Alpha and Beta releases, choosing instead to focus on increasing the robustness and eliminating (sometimes preemptively) bugs.
What's missing is testing. We haven't got much expertise in the realm of testing Android applications - in particular, because there are a lot of different conditions that Deacon needs to be subjected to in order to test out its error-handling capacity, we'd really like to automate this testing. F8'ing the emulator over and over gets old very quickly! In particular, we'd like to be able to write tests that automatically toggle the emulator's (or a real device's) network connection off and on, and switch between 3G and WiFi connections. So, we turn to you, the dev community - can anyone recommend a clean way to do this without resorting to hacking around with airplane mode?
If you can help, please leave a comment on this post, check out the corresponding open question at Stack Overflow, or hit us up on the Deacon project mailing list! We'd offer you a free copy of Deacon, but since that's already open-source, the best we can offer is to buy you a beer if we should ever meet (say, at Google IO 2011?)...
As for that Beta release - well, there aren't any giant nagging to-dos holding it back, but by the same token little has changed since Alpha. It would certainly make a nice 30th birthday present for me, but I feel it should offer a bit more value. Hanging out the "Beta" flag might encourage more developers to test out Deacon, which would hopefully garner some feedback and even more opportunities for us to improve the library. For tonight, I think I'll sleep on it...
