Updated Sidekick App: Improved reliability

The team at the Cacophony Project have updated the Sidekick app that is used with our thermal cameras.  The new version, 2.2.2, is only available to our beta testers at the moment and should be released within the next couple of weeks, all going well.  If you'd like, you can join the beta program on the play store site. If you do, please be aware that their may be bugs in the app. Any feedback you have on the new changes would be much appreciated.

Most of the changes in this release are behind the scenes, making the app more reliable and less likely to crash. These include:

• Improved event uploading. The camera records events, such as power on, and power off that are used for things, such as emails about batteries. If the camera has an internet connection then these events are uploaded without a problem. If the camera doesn't have a connection, with the previous version of the app they weren't being uploaded properly. This has now been fixed.
• Improved error messages. When there is a an error uploading events or recordings we have more meaningful error messages to help understand what is going on.
• We have added the ability to cancel uploads of recordings and events. If this was taking a long time the only way to cancel it was to close the app. There is now a cancel button.
• We have also added a way to delete recordings from the app. Sometimes the app can get some corrupt recordings that won't upload and you're always getting errors. The solution used to be to un-install and re-install the app. Now you can simply press the Delete button in the settings section
  
• Improved permissions handling. In the old version of the app, anyone could download the recordings from the camera to the Sidekick app, even if their account didn't have permission to access that camera. You would then get an error if you tried to upload these recordings and didn't have permissions. You'll now get an error message if you try to download when you don't have permissions. You will need to make sure you log into your account on Sidekick when you are in reception. If you forget to log in then we provide the ability to still download the recordings by going into settings and setting the switch: force collection of recordings and events from all devices.

The feedback from our initial testing of this app is that there are a lot less crashes.