A friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video about a Code Monkey. It tickled my funny bone enough that I thought I’d share it with others. Enjoy! =)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA[/youtube]
Code Monkey video
My current residence does not have air conditioning. I didn’t think I would miss it, but record heat waves send me out to my local library for most of the day. Luckily, this is a big library with ample seats with nearby electrical outlets and free WiFi. A perfect setting for using my laptop (which is how I normally work anyway). The only downside is the relative silence one must have in a library, but that isn’t too much of a problem unless I need to talk on the phone a while. Oh well, a small enough sacrifice for free A/C on super hot & humid days.
The weather outside looks kinda nice right now. Maybe I’ll go for a stroll before that thunderstorm in the distance rolls in. I need a break from working on my Android apps anyway.
Simple swipe detection. I know this example code has been done elsewhere, but I wanted it here for my own purposes as well. The example code uses a ListActivity and places the listener where it needs to go in order to detect swipes on the list. Continue reading
I recently had a translator volunteer some time to translate one of my apps using MS Word on the strings.xml file. What I did not realize was that MS has a funny way of displaying XML files. MS Word will not display attributes by default, which means the name attribute is all but hidden from view. So instead of seeing the string:name attribute along with the string value that needs to be translated, all my volunteer could see was the string value. The name of the string could shed light on how that string was used in the app, so finding a way to present that information to my translator was a priority. Continue reading
If you tried to publish your app to the Android Market and received an error similar to the following one, you may be running up against a block put in place by Google:
The file is invalid: W/ResourceType(15353): No known package when getting value for resource number 0x01080049 ERROR getting ‘android:icon’ attribute: attribute is not a string value
I recently ran into this error trying to publish one of my apps because the icon I chose for my app’s Preferences screen activity was a built in android resource “@android:drawable/ic_menu_preferences”. Continue reading
Filenames. Those magical labels we give our documents, our pictures, or other various creations. All filenames consist of two parts: Name.Extension where the Name part is the visible on all computer systems and the .Extension part is sometimes hidden from view. I personally hate computer systems that hide the extension because it allows phishing scammers an easy means to infect a computer by asking the victim to open up a picture called “aVirusPicture.jpg” and people will do so since they know .jpg is just a picture extension… not realizing that the full filename is “aVirusPicture.jpg.exe” because the Operating System has hidden the last “.exe” on them. Continue reading
A friend of mine was very interested in a pet project I had started a while ago when I got sick of having no compact version of Google’s switch bar available. The Market only has single toggle widgets and Google’s built in widget is quite large. I don’t toggle all those switches often enough for something like that to be useful.
After several stops and starts, I finally settled on something I could not only live with, but it is something that replaces several widgets on my phone, freeing up a lot of room for something more valuable like a memo widget, clock, pic, app shortcut, etc. etc. etc. My idea was to create a 1×1 cell widget that popped up with several toggle switches after pressing it. By doing so, it allowed for several to be grouped up together into one tiny package. The amount of “clicks” increases by one, and that will put off some people, I’m sure, but I don’t care so much for adding a click if it saves me a ton of room on my Home screen(s).
My friend also suggested I make some of the switches auto-enable themselves if the phone got plugged in as well as turning them back off once you go back on battery. I have found that plugging/unplugging the phone is usually the reason I toggle anything in the first place, so that seemed like quite a handy feature to implement.
I found the challenge to create Swidget quite enjoyable and am pleased with the outcome. I decided that there may be others like my friend and I who would like the option of a compact set of switches rather than a large set of individual ones taking up valuable Home screen real estate. Swidget is now available in the Android Market, AndAppStore, and SlideME for only $1.49.
Enjoy and take care!
A useful debugging tool, especially if you have several emulators in various states like I do, is to list all the phone settings that are stored in Settings.System and Settings.Secure as well as their current values.
$ adb shell #sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db sqlite> select * from system; sqlite> select * from secure;
Settings that once were in System migrate to Secure as Android versions get released, so it is sometimes handy to know exactly what state the phone is in while you’re debugging on it.
I was in Borders Books perusing the high end auto classifieds in the DuPont Registry looking at all the wonderfully exotic and classic cars people have and the enormous price tags on some of those beauties. One of the ad pages in the magazine caught my attention with a body style I had never seen before called an STV.
They termed it the Shadow Hawk Super Terrain Vehicle. The company hand builds each one to custom specs at a rate of 12 per year and it seems like the desert model would be the ultimate “survivor vehicle”. 🙂
I have been in the job market for a while now and I have talked with numerous recruiters and HR personnel. Many times their accent to too thick to understand or they pronounce acronyms incorrectly, but I ran into one recruiter email today which made me laugh heartily for a few minutes.
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Excellent problem-solving and coding skillsGood understanding of POOP (Principles of Object Oriented Programming) and coding best-practices, e.g. unit testing, reusability, refactoring, etc.
Experience with database development and design, both with RDBMSes and NoSQL solutions
Familiarity with web application architecture and deployment
…
I didn’t realize that some of what I learned in college was literally “crap”.