Week Ending: August 23, 2013
“This Week in CyanogenMod” is an ongoing feature that aims to serve as a one-stop shop for weekly updates. Topics discussed are culled from our social media accounts, gerrit, status updates and general thoughts.
This was a big week for us, as we announced something that we have been working on for the last few months.
CM Account
There are plenty of device tracking and wiping services out there, each touting their own advantages. They work for what they are, but some aren’t as secure as they can be. To that end, we made our own. We dubbed it the CM Account service and it is being provided as optional and free for all CM users. More details can be found on the announcement post, some additional technical details behind the encryption and additional follow-ups.
Features and things
Since some people still missed the notices about the settings restructure (including DeviceParts), pulling and re-coding of features, Cyanogen took to the web to further clarify his style of feature management for mergers. Worth a read. We will continue to work to clean up our code, de-dupe what is necessary and standardize what we can (ie HAL).
Power Widgets
Speaking of code de-duplication, Notification Power Widgets will be dying soon for 10.2. No conspiracy here, just good old fashion removable of a dated, bloated, and (mostly) unmaintained section of code. As a replacement, we offer one of our newest wares, the Quick Access Ribbon.
Menu key
Sometimes things get to us, and can be more confusing and convoluted than they need to be. Nothing has achieved that more to-date than the menu key on the m7 family of devices. Almost enough to drive a few of us to madness.
Android 4.3_r2.2
We got an unexpected code drop this week, and the freshly tagged Android code has been merged into our Github. Not much jumps out from the new code, some tweaks and changes around the App Ops functionality, but we have our own upcoming changes there 
.
We’ll keep it short and sweet this week, plenty of reading material in case you missed something above.
Got a suggestion for a topic you’d like to see in the next round-up? Let us know in the comments below. All device/port requests will be ignored.