Slower still, but steady.
Some notes about some changes. I've been doing a lot of coding the past couple of weeks, like a whole lot. It's burned me out slightly, but the drive to continue improving and understanding architecture of applications as well as design patterns keeps me going. I mention this for two reasons.
1. Release is going to be much slower than anticipated, since I will be re-writing yet again to expose myself to more of these styles and ideas in programming. My hope is that the resulting application will be clean to read, easier to extend, and faster to update in the future. Of course, plans never quite work out.
2. And speaking of plans never quite working out, the situation that I found myself in meant that for a couple of days, I would not be able to install Power Manager on my own personal devices. Days turned into weeks without the app on any of my devices, and I came to find that battery life on modern versions of Android had actually stayed the same, or generally improved in some cases. It seems that, due to Android becoming more locked down in this regard, or perhaps due to the design decisions I took when creating and updating Power Manager, it now has become more trouble than it is worth.
The modern, aggressive battery savings that Android proposes just have no way of nicely coexisting with Power Manager's aggressive requirements for radio controls as soon as the device switches into sleep, and the frequent periodic wake ups to turn off or on radios actually ended up draining more battery than the device would consume by simply putting its radios into a low power state - which the system does by default.
Because of this discovery, I am both pleased and saddened to announce that Power Manager is officially deprecated. I no longer have the need, nor really the want, to continue going against the grain developing an application that the platform does not want me to make. The last uploaded version should be relatively stable, so I will not be pulling it from the store, but no new updates will arrive in the foreseeable future.
I intend to fully update all of the pyamsoft applications that I still care to maintain to compatibility with Android O, as well as rewrite all of them in Kotlin. Luckily, aside from some of my adventures into application design and architecture, almost all of this is already complete.
pyamsoft will continue to be an independent, open source Android application developer. I will continue to develop tools that help people. I will continue to hack away at Linux, and Android. I'll continue to code, at least until this old machine dies and I need to buy a new one.
New PadLock is my current focus. I find the app useful for privacy focused minds, and it does not seem to intrude too much into the Android system vision. Right now, I am going through a full refactor of the PYDroid utility library, which serves as the base code for all pyamsoft applications.
Once the refactor is complete, I will update Home Button as a proof of concept and stability. From there, Pasterino and WordWiz will follow. ZapTorch is always a bit trickier, but it will come in time as well.
I'm thinking of doing one big chunk release, followed by small QOL updates every ~2 weeks. New applications will come when I have the time and the burst of inspiration.
I've sunset applications before. I said I would stop developing Home Button, only to turn around and continue maintaining it - even still to this day. This may not be the end for my friend Power Manager. It holds a special place as the first real Android application I set my sights on. I am happy to say that in this 2017 world, it may no longer be needed. Of course, the code is always open, if anyone wants to pick it up.
But if not - if this be its final hour - then so long, and thanks for all the fish.
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