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Basic Android App
Just wrote up instructions on how to make the most barebones Android app. Enjoy! Code here. Instructions here.
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Simple example of scheduled, self-clearing Android notifications
I couldn’t find a relevant example of doing a schedule notification that launches the app, then clears it. Various bugs and design flaws in Google’s Android O/S make this needlessly complicated, in my opinion. In this, iPhone made it easy. The basic functionality: schedule daily ordinal time (say, 10am daily) notifications. Upon click, display main…
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How To Interview For Mobile (When Nobody Knows Mobile)
This Christmas, close to 90% of shopping will occur on a mobile device. Companies are scrambling to get in-house developers. Imagine you’re hiring an in-house team. You’re tired of outsourcing with contractors. You want to be able to walk to someone’s desk and ask them, “Can we do that on Android?” And, in this fantasy,…
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Why non-native mobile frameworks suck
Hm. Opinionated a little? A couple of times, folks ask me: do you know X? And I say, why, no I don’t. I do know the language that X avoids. X is: Objective-C, Java, etc. the list goes on. Tonight at a study group, a friend who had just learned Objective-C agreed with me (I…
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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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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…