Ham Finder 2.2.12 Upgrading to Android Studio and Android 6+

I know recently I've been doing far more game development than Amateur Radio stuff, but I figured this deserved a blog post. I've been working on upgrading a lot of the internal guts to Ham Finder, specifically updating to the latest APIs. What this means is there should be prompts for permissions, for example. It should be more stable, and be overall faster. Here's what it took to do that:

1. Import in to Android Studio- When I last touched Ham Finder, it was built using Eclipse.
2. Update all of the API calls to the latest versions, getting from Gradle where possible.
3. Go through almost every file fixing issues that Android Studio detected. One of the most common issues has to do with preferences, these are now all done asynchronously, so it should be a bit faster. The same goes for maps, it should be somewhat smoother.
4. Update Spatialite- Spatialite is the core library that allows for the offline county, country, state, dxcc, etc testing. In upgrading the Android build, the old Spatialite stopped working. I was able to resolve this, with quite a bit of work.
5. I discovered a few minor issues along the way that were resolved.

 This sounds easy enough, but I actually spent quite a bit of time getting all of this to work right. The bottom line is, Ham Finder should run smoother than before. I did keep a list of a few issues I'd like to resolve that I found when working through it, but as you might have noticed, my unnamed Sea Trading Game is taking quite a bit of time. If I see enough interest, I will make some of these updates. In fact, part of the reason why I did this round of updates is because of generous purchasers buying upgrades over the last month. Thanks guys! If I see sales continue to climb, that will be a good sign that there is still interest in this product. That especially holds true if I see some of the more obscure in app purchases being bought, such as the French offline maps.

The new version should be released by August 1st, although it might take another week if I find some critical issue at the last minute. It is currently available for beta testing, which you can opt in to via this link.