Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I recently announced the release of Facebook Sync, after perfecting the UI, getting it to work for devices running Android 1.5 – 2.1, testing it on my G1, Nexus One & friends HTC Hero and T-Mobile Pulse, I put it on the Market and now I need your the help, yes you the user! I knew people would experience problems, everyone has unique contacts and Facebook friends, I’ve tried to think of all possible outcomes, but some have still slipped through.

So you’ve installed Facebook Sync and you’re having a problem where the application force closes, what do you do?

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Last week on saturday was the launch of the series 2 droplets, and well . . . they are just awesome!!!

@JamFactory sold out of the little slick ricks in 58 minutes at the fifty fifty store Bristol after throwing a cool shindig with custom Droplets galore on display. However never fear, if you want some of your own, check out Crazylabel.

But also @JamFactory got the amazing word today that the IT Crowd Series 4 want some of his Droplets for the show, so congratulations to him for that!!!

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Tags: Droplet, JamFactory
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I was lucky enough to attend the Android Developer Labs (ADL) 2010 in London and we were the first batch (of many on the ADL world tour) to receive a free Nexus One courtesy  of Google (and a huge thanks to the host Reto Meier).

Anyway I’ve been playing with it since that day and love it, I don’t have any gripes about it, what so ever.

I admit the lack of multi-touch was a pain in the back side- but as soon as I got back from London, sure enough the blogosphere was alive with comments about the multi-touch update being pushed. (I cannot begin to tell you how good those couple of days were lol!)

Here are some photo’s I took, and anyone reading this curious about the Nexus One, just go for it, any questions just post a comment

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In the 2.0 release of Android the Contacts api changed, and boy do I mean changed.

The thing is if you read through the documentation it’s near impossible to differentiate the difference between ContactsContract.Contacts and RawContacts and then Entity and Data. But there is a reasoning behind all of this and I’m going to attempt to illustrate it with a little image, while this isn’t accurate I just thought it might help some of you get to grip a bit with the differences.

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I watched a small part of the government discussions about the bill to handle file sharing and I was slightly taken back by the lack of knowledge of p2p (peer-to-peer) networks and how they work (many discussions of blocking websites on a users computer or router), now I’m not going to start with how incorrect this is, but rather discuss how p2p networking could be tackled to only support legal content.

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This phased me for quite sometime, how do I use a widget like a button, or a view as an overlay?

I asked on the Google Groups, got a great reply from Mark Murphy, and he explained about how you can use relative layouts to add views on top of the map view and set x, y coordinates and use z ordering.

I started to think about what the MapView was, then a quick look at the API and bam, addView.

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Tags: Android, MapView, Widgets
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I’ve spent probably the best part of a couple of days attempting to get Proximity Alerts working in Android. There are a large number of Google Group threads, all leading to essentially someone saying it still doesn’t work. There was one or two that had working solutions, or some who managed to get it working to a certain degree.

I managed to get a working implementation of proximity alerts by combining the information from a number of threads, this is just a guide through what I learnt and should get you up and running with your own alerts.

Just for the record, I need to learn a great deal more about Intent Filters and Broadcast Receivers as my knowledge of them is fairly vague, so please correct me in the comments if I say anything wrong, or should be implementing things differently.

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Tags: Android, Proximity Alerts
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Word of warning before we start, this goes against the standard Android UI and should only be done when you are certain it is appropriate.

To handle screen rotations such that your activity doesn’t get destroyed and restarted do the following:

1. In your AndroidManifest.xml file go to the Application tab (Assuming you are in Eclipse, Manual programmers can still use this info, but will need to work out the corresponding xml), then under Application Nodes select the Activity you want to stop the rotations on, on the right hand side under “Attributes for <Class Name> (Activity)” scroll down to  Screen Orientation and set it to portrait or landscape.
2. Then in the same section set config changes to “orientation|keyboardHidden”
3. Now back in your class add the following function and you’ll be good to go.

// Handle Screen Orientation (Stop Activity being killed and re-started)

@Override

public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig)

{

super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

}

Tags: Android, Screen Rotation
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Your making an Android app and want to take advantage of Google Maps, you’ve been bashing your head against the desk attempting to work out what is going wrong.

So welcome to this little checklist of things I’ve forgotten to do when doing this task:

1. Right click on your project in eclipse and go to properties. Then under Android select Google APIs with the correct platform number, click apply then Ok
2. Open up your Android Manifest file, under the application tab scroll to the bottom and under the Application Nodes click on Add, then double click on “Uses Library”, now for the name enter the following – com.google.android.maps
3. Your activity which is going to be displaying the map isn’t a plain old activity, it needs to be a MapActivity like: public class MapExample extends MapActivity
4. Finally your map view in the layout file should look something like <com.google.android.maps.MapView android:id=”@+id/mapview” android:layout_width=”fill_parent” android:layout_height=”fill_parent” android:clickable=”true” android:apiKey=”YOUR_API_KEY”/> where your api key can be found by doing as mentioned on the Google Maps site -http://code.google.com/android/maps-api-signup.html

This should get you up and running with lots of mappy goodness.

Tags: Android, Google, Maps
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Today I was playing around with the facebook api and needed to extract the date and time for each event. When you look at the value from the api call, you get something along the lines of:

1262028000

For the date of the event from the facebook event page, is 28th Dec 09 11:20, so what is the result above all about? Well it’s Unix Epoch Time representation of the time, however the wonderful folks of facebook convert the time into pacific time, before then converting it to Unix Epoch time. So in php to extract the date/time in your local time zone do the following:

date_default_timezone_set(‘America/Los_Angeles’);

$startDate = date(‘d m Y H:i’, $eventInfo['start_time']);

and this will give you a time like this:

28 12 2009 11:20

I can’t take any of the credit for this, all of it has to go marc2003 over at forums.overclockers.co.uk.

Anyone looking for more info on handling facebook events api I strongly recommend this site – http://www.phpeveryday.com/articles/Facebook-Programming-API-Events-P852.html

Tags: Date, Events, Facebook, Time
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