Are you doing Android development ? Whether you are using Delphi or some other Android development tool a key tool in the Android developer’s toolbox is the logcat command, part of the Android SDK. But it can be a little… how to put this kindly… crude.
So I put together a rather more useful and – dare I say attractive – front-end under the rather uninspired name of ADB WINLOG.
There she is!
ADB WINLOG is just the first app to be published and, I have to say, the most recently developed one as well. Currently I am distributing only as a binary but will open up the source at some point. The primary delay on that score is that it is heavily dependent on other library code of mine that I am still in the process of preparing to be shared.
You may have noticed a new menu item appearing at the top of the blog, and I hope to see this expand rapidly over the next weeks and months as I finally pull my finger out and get a whole host of code ship-shape and ready for sharing.
Not least this involves two of the technologies I most recently blogged about as I was in the process of putting ADB WINLOG itself together. Thread Synchronization Using Windows Messages and Managing Indeterminate Thread Object Lifetimes.
The application of those two technologies in this case should be obvious.
ADB WINLOG 1.0.1 is out now and ready to use. Just download (link on the overview page) and go!
As well as the overview and download page giving a brief summary of the application’s capabilities there is also a more detailed user guide including links to the relevant Android SDK documentation.
Enjoy!
Also, any feedback or suggestions will be more than welcome. 🙂
Why not cross platform? ADB MacLog?
Primarily because my Android development environment is Windows based so I have no use for a Mac version myself.
Secondarily because it is a VCL application that relies on platform specific details of Windows itself so cannot simply be recompiled for Mac even if the UI were FireMonkey (and as far as I know FireMonkey still lacks a virtual listview so the GUI would be far less efficient).
I may be inclined to port to Oxygene for Cocoa at some point, if only as an exercise in learning about the technical aspects of OS X development involved (threading, UI/thread synchronization, “console” output capture). But at the moment I have more than enough to keep me busy. 🙂
Nice. If you are looking for a cross platform alternative, check out Android Device Monitor. It is launched as Monitor from the tools folder of the SDK. It has some other features in addition to LOGCAT too.
Thanks and yes Paul Foster already mentioned Monitor, though those two things (cross platform and additional features) conspire to make Monitor something of a lumbering sloth in comparison to my simple logcat front end (it’s also just not as pretty :)). The UI in Monitor is also typical of single sourced cross-platform apps – uncomfortably close to the platform UX but neither close enough to feel at home nor yet distinctive enough to justify the differences.
The additional capabilities in the area of filtering are something that I already intend to improve in ADB WINLOG so I might borrow some ideas from Monitor on that score. 🙂