Yet another project!

Grawl / January 14, 2012 / 2 comments

Android development never goes the way you plan it to go. At least for me. I posted a while ago I got my hands on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It is used mainly for reading comics, which is does a good job of thanks to Perfect Viewer. Anyway, I was playing Final Fantasy VI on my PSP and I wanted to look something up for it. Leaving my bed would defeat the purpose of my handheld, so I grabbed my tablet and started to look for a GameFAQs app. There was one. And it sucks. Why? This is why. You can’t say that looks very good, right? There’s less pixels in a Japanese porno movie.

Note I updated my tablet to 3.2 yesterday (thanks Vodafone for that very late update). 3.1 doesn’t have an “auto zoom” function and it was using the dimensions of a phone on a tablet. To make it more clear; the app was clearly designed for just phones and it looks horrible on tablets in both ways.

So there was my new goal. Not as hard as creating a game (all in due time), but just a “simple” application that would look at different sites (not just GameFAQs, but also sites like NeoSeeker, IGN and whatnot). Here’s my progress to far. This time I will complete it (most likely not).

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , , , , ,

DropboxSync

Grawl / November 21, 2011 / No comments

Taking a break from learning Java, I decided to go back to my guilty pleasure called Visual Basic.

I love Crashplan, but it does exactly what it suggests it does; it makes my PC crash. I love Dropbox, but I need to manually move my files there for them to be sent to the cloud. I’m working on a simple application where you can select files you want to sync to your Dropbox folder and copy them there.

Category: Development, Visual Basic / Tags: , , ,

Classes! Objects! Java!

Grawl / November 15, 2011 / No comments

So after a hiatus of a few weeks I decided to go back to development again. Just today I learned all about classes and objects. Except I already knew about those, because I did learn Java a few years ago. But it’s good to be refreshed real quick and then move on to Java stuff that scares me (arrays and arraylists).

As suggested I’m using the Head First book, and so far it’s not horrible like the Android development book they made.

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , , ,

Tablet for development means!

Grawl / November 7, 2011 / No comments

(I didn’t get the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for development means, I just got it because I wanted to)

(Also I’m busy with Sonic Generations and pre-ordered Modern Warfare 3, L.A. Noire, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row the Third, so programming might not be my main goal for a while — sorry!)

Category: Phone Issues, Various / Tags: , , , ,

Once again a step back

Grawl / October 25, 2011 / 6 comments

While going through the latest Android book, I noticed it suddenly started going into a rollercoaster of stuff I didn’t understand. I decided to take a step back; back to learning the root of evil (read: Android)… Java.

I learned Java in college, but I forgot most of it. Both Java and OO (Object Orientated) are very important in the Android development business. So I asked around, and according to the Something Awful forums the devils who made the Head First Android book, actually made a good Head First Java book. You get one more attempt Head First (but your Android book still sucks and I’ll never look at it again).

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , ,

Hello, Sudoku interface!

Grawl / October 19, 2011 / No comments

As I posted before, I wasn’t happy with the previous Android book (not worth even mentioning the name), so I started using Hello, Android!

This book has been really great so far. I skipped the first two chapters (how to install Eclipse, create your first app etc.) and did a bit of backtracking by doing interfaces again. However, not soon into chapter 3 I learned a lot about the different lay-outs and how to create new classes and whatnot. The book does a good job at explaining what it does. So far I’ve just created the main menu for the Sudoku application, but it has a working about-button (which shows a dialogue), a settings-button that responds to the menu-button on an Android phone and an option to pick a difficulty using an arraylist.

I think I’m on the right track at last!

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , , , ,

Market Crash HTC HD2

Grawl / October 18, 2011 / One comment

I’m quickly going to share with you have to fix the market crash on the HTC HD2 running Android 2.3.4.

First, install Script Manager from either the market (uninstall updates in order to access the old market, since the new one will crash) or transfer it to your phone.

Now run Script Manager, add a new script and make sure this is in the file (nothing else).

su
chmod 777 cache

Run this script as root and boot, restart your phone and voila! Now I don’t need to upgrade my phone to 2.3.7 for a while (and why would I? the API is the same).

I’ll try to get an update on my android process up soon, I’ve been laying low for a while.

Category: Phone Issues, Various / Tags: , ,

Bye, Head First Android Development!

Grawl / October 13, 2011 / No comments

After a few days of no Android development, I decided to go back to the Head First book. I left somewhere in the middle of a chapter, and not much to my surprise it’s a mess yet again. I’m not going through with this, so I decided to ditch the book.

I’m going to try out Hello, Android. Hopefully that book is written a bit better or at least with less errors. Shouldn’t be a hard challenge though. We’ll see. I’ll start working on it soon. I have the entire weekend off, so that’s good news (for me – I think?).

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , ,

Hello, Head First book!

Grawl / October 10, 2011 / No comments

My oh my, it really didn’t go much smoother since the last post. At first I added a new button to refresh the page (checks if there’s a new RSS entry and if that’s the case show it) and that all went fine. More stuff about editing layouts, which was useful.

I even managed to get a dialogue screen showing. From there on it just went downhill. The code in the book makes no sense and even the source code on the official website is lacking a bit, because it adds a lot of stuff not covered in the book so I have no clue what I’m actually adding.

What I did wrote an e-mail to the author, because there’s a newer edition of the book out in digital form. Let’s see if he agrees on the mistakes and grants me a copy of a book that will actually help me.

Update: I got a reply from the author. Not what I was hoping for though;

Hi Grawl.
I’m really sorry your having trouble with the code errors and mismatches and typos.
To set your mind at ease, you DO NOT have to repurchase the book. This was released as an early access book, and we are aware of the errors. It’s a bit of a dance to balance getting the book out to readers early with errors, vs waiting until it’s completely finished. We decided to let readers purchase the book early, understanding that there would be errors, and that we would update it. I’m actively working to fix them and get them out to early readers as soon as possible. In fact, an update just went out today addressing many of the errors in Chapters 7-9. You should have gotten an email from O’Reilly letting you know this was available, and is no cost to you.
There should be no dilemma. You’ll get updates for the book as soon as I update it, up until the final ebook – and print book – is published.
I’ve copied my editor Brian Sawyer at O’Reilly. Please contact him or me if you have any further issues.
Best.
Jonathan

That really helps with a hard copy I guess. I can’t get the Nasa app to work with the next chapter, even if I literally copy-paste the source code from the official site. It’s too troublesome to check out where it goes wrong for something I’ll probably never use.

I started to work on chapter 7, and the books just keeps getting messier. Lots of errors. I really recommend not using this book, it started out great, but it’s just a waste of money now. On the other end, it does help to troubleshoot a lot of problems in Eclipse and learning how to use it. Not too sure if that was their goal though…

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: ,

Hello, NASA Daily Image! (chapter 3)

Grawl / October 10, 2011 / No comments

Chapter 3 starts with a cool idea; create an application that allows you to check the daily image NASA publishes using their RSS-feed. The app will check the feed, parse it and display it on the screen.

I guess that’s the most positive thing I have to say about this chapter though…

The book is suddenly filled with typos, even in the source code. If a book about programming shouldn’t have, it’s typos in that area. My screen was filled with errors, and it was up to me to fix them. At some point though, I got stuck. You’re suddenly introduced to parsers, without any explanation how they work. In the end I checked out the website and found update source code. Update September this year. That’s last month… The code looked nothing like the one in the book, so in the end I just ended up copying it from the website without really understanding how to parse. Not a big deal, because I don’t think I’ll need it any time soon, but it’s sloppy. Very sloppy.

To keep things positive, I did learn how to set permissions for apps (in this case, so it could access the internet). I’m going to look a bit more into the code to see how it works and hopefully chapter 4 will be written a bit better. I don’t have high hopes though, because it continues to expand the app and since the source code is so different I don’t know how far I’ll get. We’ll see.

Category: Development, Learning the Ropes / Tags: , , , , , ,
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