Random stuff about mobile development, great outdoors, and cooking. Who am I kidding, it's mostly about programming! 🤓
Flickr photo by _fLeMmA_
It has been a long couple of months from before Thanksgiving straight through Christmas and New Years and I was very busy during those times. I didn’t get a whole lot done on anything Android related, including working much on my first app to be published to the Android Market, titled Grandma Jong.
I’m really excited about attending the third local BarCamp in DC tomorrow! Yep, we’re already on our third one here locally (not to mention all the others happening in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area). I’m planning on co-presenting on Android development with Zvi Band. I’ll be showing a simple graphical app with animation and touch screen input.
I’m also using this opportunity to launch the first in a series of articles on Android development, gradually improving this simple app into something useable in a real app involving animations and graphics. Stay tuned, I’ll be posting the first article here sometime next week.
Version 1.6 of the Android SDK has been released to developers. Though this isn’t a major release, there are quite a few tasty updates that I’m looking forward to (both as a user and a developer).
Continue reading “Next version of Android SDK (1.6/Cupcake) ready for developers”
I came across this interesting discussion yesterday regarding WVGA supporting coming in the Donut (1.6) version of Android OS. It looks like there will be a lot of work cut out for developers because we’ll need to support Cupcake (1.5) which is standardized on HVGA, and Donut which will now start supporting not only various resolutions, but also various screen densities. As developers, we’ll need to consider our layouts on various screens to make sure the look their best. Thankfully, there will be some built-in support for scaling layouts and images to ease the transition.
There is a blog post being written on the topic of different screen sizes, and we have gone through round after round of work on the underlying model of the platform and how to best explain the way this works, which is reflected in the doc.
As a side note, Al Sutton of AndAppStore.com has prepared a build of the 1.6 SDK and eclipse plugin to help test out the features coming in the next revision. We’ll need all the head start we can get to implement these new features. I’ve played around with this a bit, and like some of the new features coming to the eclipse plugin. I’ll write more about these later.
AndroLib.com is a third-party website (not run by Google) that presents a nice display of all the apps available in the Android Market. They have been crunching some statistics about what kinds of apps are available and the number of downloads they have. One interesting bit of information is that at least 25% of the apps have less than 50 downloads! Continue reading “Distribution of apps in the Android Market”
I made this raw/vegan ice cream sandwich for my wife’s birthday. The recipe is from the excellent cookbook Ani’s Raw Food Desserts: 85 Easy, Delectable Sweets and Treats by Ani Phyo.
Here are the slides for my introductory presentation on the Android platform and some useful links to Android related sites. Continue reading “An introduction to the Android platform”
I use Launchy, a great program launcher for Windows and Linux, that indexes your Start menu, icons on the desktop and lets you quickly and easily launch them. It’s also smart about letting you type the least amount, and learns as you repeat the same shortcut over and over. I mapped the shortcut key to Windows+Space which is the most convenient for me. Continue reading “Resolving conflict between Google Desktop and Launchy”