Posts

At MeetMe, we have a yearly internal conference wherein we invite folks internal and external to speak to the team (en masse & in breakouts) about emerging technology, trends, core company bits, etc. My core focus this year has been about spicing up our Android applications through exceptional UI/UX specifically using the grace and beauty of animations. As they say, sharing is caring, and I want everyone else to have access… so please, take a look through my presentation. If you have feedback, questions, hate mail, or anything else – please comment below. ...

So, I’ve been Googling for a while to find a clean, reasonable approach for putting a ViewPager inside of a ListView (or any vertically scrolling element). The problem with putting a ViewPager inside a ListView is that it takes only a small amount of vertical (Y) delta before the ListView begins to consume touch events instead of delegating to the child in order to enable the scrolling of the ListView. That’s fine, but the problem often occurs after the ViewPager has already started processing a page change (when dragging horizontally), producing a poor user experience resulting in the improper pagination and scrolling of the two views. ...

Occasionally (and especially when receiving assets) I have the need to rename multiple files at once – often by some sort of pattern. For instance, I may need to rename all files with the string "_msg" in it where the file ends with ".png". Previously, I might have manually found and renamed all of them or written some hack of a bash “for loop” to iterate over a find result. Neither options are quick or easy. ...

Check out my post on how MeetMe went international on Android over on our Engineering Blog.

I was recently asked by Corey Latislaw to join her, Chuck Greb, and Arpit Mathur in helping organize the Android Alliance Philadelphia group. I am proud to announce that I have accepted the position as Social Media Director of Android Alliance Philadelphia and that I plan on helping to create an even more engaging community. I am excited to help bring in even more Android enthusiasts, creators, and users with interesting topics and informative events. ...

Last night, I gave a lightning talk alongside Matt Smollinger (a myYearbook iOS developer) and other local developers for Philly Tech Week 2012. My talk centered around downloading, caching, and displaying images in an Android application. Check out Drowning in Images – Memory Management or all of my presentations. You can also watch a video of my presentation on YouTube. I have to thank Android Alliance Philly and Philly Cocoaheads

Even though I have recent checkouts of the Android source on my local machine, I usually prefer a more convenient and quick way to look at the platform code. Looking through source files on my local machine can often be slow to find the appropriate files and unreasonable to keep open in an IDE all of the time. Instead, I’ve been using the copy of the Android source that is hosted on github. ...

[Update 2014-09-02]: Since this original post, a plugin has been made for Android Studio/IntelliJ by Michał Charmas with contributions from me as well. See android-parcelable-intellij-plugin for installation instructions. I have created a tool for making the methods needed for implementation of Android’s Parcelable interface within a pre-existing class. Open the parcelabler tool. Copy the full code of the class into the “Code” text field. Example code: public class Photo { /** * Caption for the photo */ public String caption; public int commentCount; public long photoId; public boolean isDefault; public Bundle metadata; public CommentHandler commentHandler; } Click “Build” to create the methods ...

At myYearbook, we produce our internal and release candidate builds for all of our Android applications using Jenkins CI. This allows us to automatically produce builds when changes are pushed to code review (through gerrit) as well as when they’re merged upstream. This process is great for keeping integration clean and organized, but it means that QA, product development, and sometimes developers have to download the produced APK from jenkins on to their computer, and then install from the location they downloaded to. In order to expedite this process, I wrote a wrapper script for adb to allow the installation of an APK from a URL. ...

If your Motorola Droid 2 is in a state of constant loading (at the startup/splash screen) something has gone awry with your device. Unfortunately, the only way I know to resolve this is to perform a hard reset. This hard reset wipes the operating system of the device and reinstalls it from memory. You will lose your installed apps and have to re-download them. If you purchased apps, as long as you log in to the device with your same email address, you will be able to download the apps again for free. ...