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Important Failures
I really like attending conference talks on how people screwed up. Not just to laugh at their mistakes, but to learn from them. It’s important to fail, and so many people are afraid of admitting it, for various reasons. Thing is, if they failed at something awesome– a new gaming console, a cure for cancer,…
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Testing? For iPhone? Mooooo….*
I wrote a blog post about Cedar way back in the day. Now, Xcode ships with OCUnit. I’ll go through a basic way of adding tests to an existing project, as that’s a very common task, and not very well documented thus far. Props to the following blog posts- I’m consolidating their advice basically in…
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The Imposter Syndrome and Knowing What You Don’t Know
I really have never thought I had Imposter Syndrome. I’m not a shrinking violet, I tend to talk pretty authoritatively, I’m confident, like to speak in public, etc. Yet, I joined a mailing list for women-techs and during discussions this term came up. I looked it up, and started locating this behavior in a few…
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My Latest Development Mantras
Maybe, perhaps because I’m an English major, I tend to notice patterns in my speech. So, I noticed recently that I keep saying the same phrases in discussions regarding mobile app development: – secret sauce – no login – no back button – mentoring – phase 2 – did the customer want that – don’t…
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Playing Back Wav in 2.2 Androids
It’s tough, and I just got it to work. See zipped code here. The key was writing the streamed URL code to a local disk space (always same file). Despite the purported support, Android 2.2.1 does not support WAV streaming. That is, you can’t play it directly from a URL. Basically wrote our own “setDataSource”…
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Lovely Gradient Buttons… in Android
I wrote an iPhone post and hinted that I had an Android implementation, and I do! You can download the project here: unicorn.zip Normal Highlighted So you want lovely gradient buttons, and when you press them, you want another gradient layer to show. Define your layout in xml, add a button Set “background” to a…
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Android ProgressBar: Starting, and Stopping Them
Ah, just spent a while figuring this out. You have a progress bar, you’d like it to start, and, you’d like it to stop. There are lots of examples of start a progress bar, but very little on how to stop, or interrupt it. That’s the key- you are interrupting a running while loop. The…
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iPhone Gradient Buttons, with Highlighting
My app- Lyrics– is pretty simple graphically. The only real object we have is a button. So, it’s nice to get the most out of my designer, and he has repeatedly been a fan of gradient buttons with a different visual gradient when pressed (highlighted in iPhone talk). While iPhone is great for a lot…
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Recording and Playback on both iPhone and Android
Download on Google Play and on iTunes My goal was to record little snippets on both iPhone and Android, and share those files between users, on Facebook. As usual, I want old Android users (2.2+) and iPhone (3+) users to participate in this app. I originally recorded in iPhone CAF, then realized the file size…