Archive for August, 2009

I just read an article over at linux insider http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/67982.html and it basically discusses the confusion between Android and Chrome OS – My question is, what confusion?

Android in my eyes has always been a mobile phone platform, now I admit mobile phones, smart phones, smart books, its all blurring a bit so my definition of what should be running Android – a device which can be used for making phone calls, has a small screen making full aplications difficult to use, processor and memory (RAM) is limited. Something along those sort of lines. Or devices that don’t necessarily require a full blown OS, something more light weight.

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Tags: Android, Chrome OS, Google, Linux
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Yes thats right, the new linux version of Skype has been released . . . . finally,

I just installed it on my MacBook 4.1 and the sound was working right away, might be worth me fixing up my cam now for whenever I go travelling.

Anyway everyone go here to get your download – http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/choose/

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After everything The Pirate Bay went through, you would of thought that the company who bought them would of made it a legal site and everything would of resolved itself, but after recent rumours that the company doesn’t have the money to buy TPB, then the Swedish government trying to get the “ISP” of TPB to stop the site from being live. They retaliated by posting a temporary site, mocking the move, and claiming they would be up again in a few hours and sure enough they were.

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Tags: Pirate Bay
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This is just a place holder because I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the google deb file of Google Chrome.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=unstable_i386_deb

I gotta say it seems pretty fast and the only reason I’m considering it as a possible browser over firefox is the “each tab is a seperate process or thread” feature and the speedy javascript engine. But wait and see how stable it is

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What I’m going to do now is begin setting up some more of the basic layout of the app to get it looking roughly how I want, so here are some of the things I wanted to achieve.

1. Fullscreen or no title bar
2. Tiled background
3. Add in the buttons on the top menu

Fullscreen

To get the fullscreen view I went into the AndroidManifest.xml file, then under the ‘Application’ tab I set the theme for the main activity to @android:style/Theme.Black.NoTitleBar. This sets the app to open in fullscreen but without the title bar at the top of the app which is set by default. If you want to take up the entire screen then you should use @android:style/Theme.Black.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen, this then removes the notification bar.

Tiled Background

Now I already had an image I put together that could be tiled, but you can’t use a 9 patch PNG as this stretches the image, not tile it. So to get it to tile you have to create an xml file in your res/drawable folder and add the following code:

<bitmap xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:src=”@drawable/wood_bg”
android:tileMode=”repeat” />

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I’ve been meaning to do an Android project for quite some time, but because of Uni work and exams I haven’t had the time, but since break I figured I could make a start on a project. I also remember how hard I found it to make my own app when I first started using Android, so here it is for anyone interested, I start to finish app covering the EVERY part of app development. The app I’m going to make is nothing too exciting, it’s just a simple to-do list that will let you sort the to-do’s in different orders and select a view, all the to-do’s or view to-do’s in groups of weeks or days.

I was tempted to do a screencast but decided not to because I don’t think it would offer any real advantage to explaining through text and images, but if you’d like the rest of series to be a screencast I’d be happy to give it a shot.

DISCLAIMER: Most of the techniques I use are from what I’ve gathered from the internet, books and may not be the best approach, so remember “Do as I say, not as I do” and we’ll be all ok.

In my mind their are 2 sides to any program, the GUI and the back-end. The more these 2 things can be kept apart the better, that way what we change on either side, hopefully, won’t affect the other side. So considering this is the first part of this set of tutorials I figured I start of with some friendly GUI stuff to get you all thinking just about what you may want your app to look like and realise you aren’t stuck to the Android default UI.

For this part of the series I’m going to show you all how to make a custom button, and this will show you:

• What to consider when creating simple interfaces
• Illustrate how 9-Patch PNG’s work
• How to create custom buttons

So I played around in GIMP (An open source version of Photoshop) to mock up roughly what I want my app to look like and this is what I came up with.

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So tonight I finally got Jaunty on my MacBook – from my experience there is a bug in the current Jaunty CD’s (both alternate and live CD) by which GRUB boot loader doesn’t install properly, the weird thing was I didn’t have this problem when I first tried Jaunty. Anyway if you want jaunty go and download Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 from here – http://releases.ubuntu.com/intrepid/. Install that on your macbook the normal way (For a full guide go here – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1192296)

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So I changed from Drupal to Wordpress, why?. . . because I loves it I does!

To be honest I didn’t give Drupal a fair try, but I felt I could develop my site faster without a full blown CMS as there aren’t any problems with fairly trivial things.

Anyway this design is probably very few people’s cup of tea but one thing I love is the speech bubble comment boxes below for comments, leave a message to see what I mean and my sliding tabs (Twitter, Wordpress and Flickr) – again give ‘em a click to see what I mean.

But in all seriousness please post me a comment if you like the design or can suggest any improvements.

p.s. Hopefully I’ll post some useful blog stuff soon

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