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Presenting introduction to Android

Just a quick heads up that I will be presenting an introduction to Android and hosting a little discussion about opportunities it presents at the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. tomorrow evening. If you are interested you might be able to sneak in or otherwise I can always present again if you find an audience and venue 😉

Update: The presentation Android: Explained by Numbers is now available for download.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-11-14

Had to turn off this week in mobile off .. 3 blind apple fanboys make for a useless show, where are you @androidashley ? #
The upcoming @intellijidea eap is gonna rock for #android dev. I am using a prebuilt plugin code base and there are some great improvements #
#pandroid podcast was a good start. Lots to talk about still #maven #android #roboguice @intellijidea #robotium and so on #
#android app in market upgraded. All went well as far as I can tell. Looking forward to more users and feedback. #
Added a sidebar navigation to the #maven #android plugin wiki page. The normal menu with favourites and such is just too painful. #
The improvements for #android dev in general and with #maven specifically in the new @intellijidea eap rock! #
Me too ..♻ @tomasmalmsten: Using #RoboGuice () to alleviate some of the pains with Android development. #
Awesome news that Apple and Oracle cooperate on OpenJDK for MacOsx. Just like I have requested 😉 next Google to include OpenJDK in Android #
New blog post about managing your #android application version from release to release with #maven plugin http://goo.gl/w6VLK #
Trying to get obfuscation and optimizations on a complex #android app to work is anything but boring.. #

Release version management for your Android application

Today I am going to explain an improvement I made to the MorseFlash example application that I created as part of the Maven Android Plugin samples. It will help by automating the management of the version name and code. But one thing after the other.
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-11-07

Released version 2.5.2 of ksoap2 #android project adding https transport and other things http://goo.gl/Uvjt @AndroidDev #
Want to learn about #scala , cloud computing and #gridgain Come to the upcoming #vijug meeting! http://goo.gl/cNnit #
Using it every day! ♻ @twoofour: Eclipse haters rejoice: IntelliJ IDEA gets Android support (via @keineantwort ) #
Sometimes the hard things are done in seconds and then the polishing of small things takes for ages. #android @AndroidDev #
Think about using shrinkColumns and stretchColumns with #android tablelayout.It sometimes fixes seemingly unrelated issues. @AndroidDev #
Very nice.. ♻ @ko5tik: working on lightweight #OCR library for #android – image slicing code works: http://sf.net/projects/javaocr/ #
Yes .. I win! BitmapFactory.decodeResource is dpi aware. decodeFile is not … so use drawable-nopdi !! @AndroidDev #android #
That should be true even if you review your own old code.♻ @rgladwell: when reviewing my colleague's code is it normal to wish I was dead? #
ROFL!! @IntoMobile How iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry Users See Each Other #
When using #proguard on your #android app, you should really make sure to -keep your R class… @androiddev #
#svn merges really stink… it just buggered up my #maven pom totally. Good thing I checked. #
Turning fastScrollEnabled on for all my listviews. Why is this not on by default? #androiddev #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-10-31

On my way to #androidto #
Watching @puleen set up a sample #androidto app at #androidto .. the room is filling up slowly. in reply to puleen #
Sick hearing the fragmentation issue raised again. Diversity is a STRENGTH!! #androidto #android #
Finished with my presentation about #Maven and #android at #androidto Seemed to get lots of interest about co builds and more. #
Learning about #android widget creation. Sweet, that will save me some sdk reading. #androidto @pearlchen #
I got outweigh.. RT @ragobeer: The guy speaking right now has a lot of geekIQ #awesome #androidTO #
I got outed.. RT @ragobeer: The guy speaking right now has a lot of geekIQ #awesome #androidTO #
The file for my presentation about #maven and #android is up on my website now. #androidto @androiddev #
Recovering from #androidto I was among the last ones to leave the pub together with @androidsNsheep @MatthewPatience @chris_saunders #
Amazing how you sometimes run into people. I had a great time meeting @digitalfemme yesterday. #
#androidto recap and announcement of expansion of simpligility. Androids on board ! http://goo.gl/tEUS #
Glad u liekd it. ♻ @tomwalsham: Great talk from Manfred Moser on automated Android build/test/deploy using Apache Maven #androidTO #
I have been listening to the "new" podcast This Developers Life http://thisdeveloperslife.com/ and so far every episode rocked! #

Growth

I love how life keeps throwing opportunities and challenges at me and experiencing the personal growth I gain from taking them onboard and running with it. Recent things that I remember fondly are big changes like starting my own company, completing home improvement projects and of course every day again and again being a dad of three little, but fast growing rascally boys. Smaller things are reading and thoroughly enjoying books like ReWork. And then there are events like yesterdays AndroidTO developer conference for Android. It was the first such conference in Canada and in my opinion a huge success. I was invited to present by Puleen Patel and took up the opportunity and made my way all the way from Victoria.
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Reviving ksoap2 for Android

If you are developing Android applications that need to interface with SOAP web services, you probably know that the Android SDK does not have any support for this technology. It is somewhat considered legacy, but it is still widely used in many enterprise applications. When you look around for a SOAP library that is suitable for mobile devices in the sense that it is not too heavy you will inevitable find ksoap, which has a history on J2ME and Blackberry. Unfortunately the project has been pretty much dead for a long time now.
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Hands on lab about Maven and Android development at AndroidTO

After doing successful presentations about using Apache Maven for building and managing your Android applications and related dependencies in Vancouver and Barcelona, I am have been invited to do a workshop at the Android developer event AndroidTO at the end of October in Toronto. More and more good patches and features are making into the Maven Android Plugin and there story for users just keeps getting better and better. I look forward to see all the other presentations, meet with other developers and share my stories.

Update: The presentation in front of close to 200 people went well and there was a lot of interest into continuous integration builds, using libraries and testing. For your please you can get the presentation file with the links to code samples and so on. Enjoy!

Maven and Android in Barcelona

Just a quick heads up that I will be presenting about Apache Maven usage for Android development in an updated version from my Vancouver presentation at the Google Technology User Group in Barcelona, Spain on the 10th of September. I look forward to the event and will let you know here how things went 😉

Later..

I just came back from the presentation and uploaded the presentation file now (Maven Android Introduction GTUG Barcelona). The rest of the resources is available as part of the Maven Android Plugin Samples and the Roboguice project. The meeting itself was fun. There were over 30 other geeks in attendance and the presentation was regularly interrupted with laughter and questions, so I assume it was well received. I hope everyone learned a bit and will give Maven and Android a spin and send us some feedback.

Referential integrity with sqlite on Android the lazy way

Android As you all know the main supported persistence mechanism on Android is storing data in the extremely widespread embedded database SQLite. Now when you look around various books and documentation, the examples you get are most of the time are pretty trivial. When you then come from a background of full on relational database management systems like PostgreSQL, working with SQLite with have a few surprises to you. One of those surprises is that referential integrity is not a standard feature unless you have some tricks up your sleave.. Read more →