getting close to done

I finally managed to build a resizable EditText box. So you click on the Add Text button, and a little grey box pops up onscreen on top of your drawing. It's semi-transparent so you can see what's going on below. The keyboard pops up and you type your stuff. A double-headed arrow icon on the right: left/right will increase the width of the box, up/down will change the size of the font. Touch the checkmark icon at the top and the text will be placed. Press & hold on the text itself will let you drag it around to where you want it.

This is getting nice. It's reasonably smooth and intuitive.

There are several things I need to fix to get it fully working right. At the moment it doesn't place the text where I want, and the size is being measured in actual pixels, so if you're zoomed out on the page, it's freaking teeny tiny. These are scaling issues. The other bit is gracefully deleting the EditText when finished -- I need a hook or a listener or something that the EditText can use to tell the app it's done.

More Play Store piracy

I wrote about this back in April. I do not browse the Play Store all that often -- once a month, maybe a bit more -- and I found another one a couple days ago. The game is the property of Mateusz Skutnik, an artist and Flash programmer lauded by escape gamers for his atmospheric, brain-twisting Submachine series.

I notified Mateusz and he confirmed that the developer did not have permission to port his work to Android. He'll be taking action on it.

Because the games they steal are by different developers, pirates' offerings are going to be very diverse in visual style. A developer making his or her own apps will have a certain style, probably more clearly seen in games than other apps. Widgets such as control buttons and menu styles will be re-used, and the flow from one activity to the next will likely have the same feel.

The ad load of a pirated game will be high. That's one thing that you can count on, because the game is free and this is the sole means of revenue.

It would be interesting if Google, with its advanced abilities to search images for faces and general concepts, applied this to the Play Store.