Boom : http://www.martynhaigh.com/blog/2011/10/20/android-sources-plugin-for-eclipse/

Cheers Martyn.

Search for “format” in Eclipse preferences – XML > Split multiple attributes each on a new line

Then Just go to: Android > Editors > Automatically format the XML edited by the visual layout editor

Then for formatting Java code:

Search for “line” then go to Java > Code Style > Formatter > Edit the active profile, change the Maximum Line Width to something huge like 1000

It’s that time of year when all the conferences are a go and if you’re an Android developer the key event you should have in your diary is Droidcon UK 2011.

I attended the second day of the event last year (Was in project deadline mode for the first day unfortunately) and thoroughly enjoyed it. Judging by the speaker list so far it should be an unmissable event.

The main talks I’d personally have on the top of my list: Richard Hyndman & Nick Butcher from Google, Mark Murphy form CommonsWare, Yosi Taguri from BlueVia (interesting revenue share opportunities with telefonica) and Kieran Gutteridge.

If you’ve not been to this or any of the Londroid events, this is a great event to get to know some of the people in the Android community and I’m quite excited to see how much larger the community has grown.

There are still some early bird tickets to go, so get ‘em while you can: http://uk.droidcon.com/content/register

Hopefully see you there

*Image from DeadZebra.com

After reading the story by Shifty Jelly about the Amazon App Store’s “Free app of the day”, I kind of felt that Amazon had let down the developer community and I didn’t want to a part of it anymore. If you missed the article it’s well worth a read: Shifty Jelly – Amazon App Store : Rotten to the Core.

The post briefly mentions how the Amazon App Store doesn’t allow developers to remove their applications, this gave me a slight hint of doubt to how valid the story was, but a quick check and yup, no remove, delete or un-publish button.

Right so things weren’t looking great, a quick search and I had a e-mail address to request removal. Side note, it’s my application, why should I “request” removal when every other store lets me control it? Anyway, off I went and sent an e-mail, to which I received this response:

“Hi Matt,

Thank you for your message. We need to verify that you are removing the same app(s) from any Similar Services (defined as any Android OS application store which distributes in the U.S. and its territories and possessions) at the same time barring other agreements that may prevent you from listing the app(s) in the Amazon Appstore. Please refer to the Distribution Agreement for Amazon Appstore:

3.a. Delivery Commitment for Apps. You will deliver electronically to us and continue to make available during the Term all versions of all software applications, games or other digital products (including any special or collector’s editions) (i) that are designed for the Platform, (ii) for which you have the rights required under this Agreement, and (iii) that are the same versions and editions (except as otherwise provided in this Agreement) that you or your affiliates make available directly or indirectly to any Similar Service….

Please respond to confirm that your request for app(s) withdrawal is compliant with our policies. Once we hear back from you, we will verify and then let you know how we will proceed.”

Essentially, remove your app from the Android Market because you agreed to these terms that what ever everyone else has, we have. Well not quite, I’d already broken this by not updating the single app I had on the Amazon App Store. The reason being that the Amazon App Store gave me less than 10 downloads throughout the entire duration of it being posted, so not a vital thing to update. But why does Amazon encourage this obscene ruling?

What happened if I decided to deprecate an old application, pushing out vital updates, but making it as easy as possible to maintain. Do I really want to update an application in numerous places?

After responding I was given the option of terminating the contract, which I gladly jumped at the opportunity.

So in 10 days from receiving a response from their legal team the contract should be terminated. Hopefully this link will break soon (http://www.amazon.com/Gaunt-Face-Admob-Beta/dp/B004Q6S8P8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=mobile-apps&qid=1312491224&sr=1-1) it’s only been 24 hours so far, I’m sure it’s a long process that could not be cut down to match Android’s near instantaneous un-publishing.

Just to top off everything I was kindly asked for some feedback:

“In order to improve our offering we would appreciate feedback on why you are terminating your agreement. Thank you again for participating in the Amazon Appstore program — if you have any other questions, or would like to contact us in the future about participation in the program, please visit the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal: https://developer.amazon.com/welcome“

Well in all honesty, anyone who requires me to give up all control of my applications and wants to charge me $99 for the privilege, needs to rethink their strategy (I was lucky enough to be invited for the first year free). Secondly, read the Shifty Jelly’s article, thirdly, don’t make the only way for me to remove an application, be to terminate my contract with you!!

In a similar vain to Bill Bailey: “Hey Amazon, I ain’t gonna be your bitch”

• First step is to login to Admob.com on your PC.
• Go to Account > Account Information
• Enable the API Password if you haven’t already: “Enable read-only API access to your account”
• Use this API Password with your normal e-mail address to login to the application

I hope to implement a much nicer way of getting this information on behalf of the user, but it’s all a matter of time.

Any questions feel free to leave a comment

sudo gedit /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Add this to the end of the file:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot “/home/matt/Sites/GauntFace/Local”
ServerName gauntface.local.co.uk

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all

Then add the servername to the hosts file:

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

And add:

127.0.0.1 gauntface.local.co.uk

Finally restart the server and all should be well in the world:

sudo /etc/rc.d/httpd restart

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on here . . . . . too long.

But I have been a little bit busy

I left my Android team at Mubaloo over a month ago to join the awesome folks over at Future Platforms and as Tom Hume put it, I had a “baptism of fire” for my first project. I was started straight away on the Glastonbury application for Android developing the custom schedule screen and then progressing on to the other areas of the app with James Hugman.

Since the release, it was featured on the Android Market, *making it the second app I’ve worked on to get featured in the Android Market #cough * and now working on a new project for Symbian and getting to grip with Qt.

Hopefully since I’ve now settled down in Brighton and got the flat set up I will start to get on with some of my own projects and also get round to open sourcing some bits of code here and there. I also hope to get back into attending some events, something I feel I’ve stopped doing recently as well as giving any talks, so anyone looking for a speaker on mobile feel free to drop me an email

Most events I’ve ever attended have one of two approaches:

1. The event is made of lots of short talks with option to break off into smaller groups later

2. The event is an hour or two with talks on how x, y and z was achieved which would be new features used in a fairly complete example

3. Several talks going on at once and you’re given the choice of which talks to attend

Normally I’ve found these to be particularly useful, whether it’s just one part of the event or the entire thing, the app summit was different, it was one room and all talks were held one after the other.

The biggest problem I had with this approach is it meant that whatever stage you are in with you’re Android development, you need to either listen in or sit outside the hall. I listened to all the talks, hoping it would get into some fairly advanced topics, but to be honest I was left feeling fairly disappointed.

The UI tips given were tainted with the comments along the lines of “There aren’t any guidelines for tablet app design”. Well Motorola, if you have a UI expert and you have one of the first Android tablets and you’re traveling the world to meet the developer communities to show you’re tablet and encourage app development, could you note at least give some recommendations?

The examples of fragments, UI customisation, HTML5 use and other area’s were fairly simplistic and often an incomplete example.

The fragments topics, while useful for someone completely new (which I am), it didn’t actually show any real insight into the problems fragments introduce, i.e. should we really be developing using the compatibility package? Again the answer was along the lines of “Google want you to produce only one build”, in other words “we’ll tell you what Google want us to tell you”.

Don’t get me wrong Google have done great things, but if their recommendation isn’t the best solution, say so and say it with confidence!!

The HTML5 example was literally just a web page, that scaled well, it didn’t look like it was targetted for tablets or phones in terms of a UI for touch devices.

The main highlights for me were the talks from Ben Medlock the CTO from TouchType / Swiftkey who went over their shift from mobile to tablets, but also discussed how Android helped him start his company and the community had helped along the way as well. The other great talk was from one of the Adobe Evangelists who went over the capabilities of Flash on Mobile and Tablets and he gave some very nice and compelling reasons to move over to Adobe for mobile development, now he didn’t touch too much on cross compiling for different devices, only Android phones and Tablets, but very enthusiastic and gave some interesting examples and cool features that could be used to get going quickly for certain tasks.

To be honest I think it comes down to me not being the target audience, I would of been much happier cutting the event down to four hours, given one hours worth of talking at (sales pitch or whatever) and then lent a Xoom to hack on for the rest of the day with optional talks.

Also while at the event I met Matt Oakes, who like me, wasn’t to impressed by the MotoDev App Summit app. For me I prefer his as being more along the lines of what MotoDev would be producing. It has the action bar, the views have been customised to create a nice, simple and elegant application. Mine is a slightly more O.T.T equivalent, but again focused on the UI.

Below are the official MotoDev App Summit App, my application and finally Matt Oakes application.

But this is frankly the most simple application and I would of expected much more from Motorola on this front, I spent 4 – 5 hours on my application and stopped at the event details because I didn’t have the time to hard code the details in. But given a full day I would of matched their functionality, given another day I could of included mapping functionality, which hooked into Google Maps for directions and sharing capabilities with the hashtag included in the tweets. Then on the third day I would of optimised it for the Xoom (Something the current release doesn’t do, or it at least didn’t at the London event).

All in all the event was good to meet new and old faces within the community, all I hope is that Motorola take a bit of a forward step in the way they organise the event, give developers the opportunity to actually develop on the Xoom while there and also have more concrete and full examples.

As someone pointed out, forget the fancy hotel, put us in a basement and give us a free Xoom. That will guarantee you a room full of developers getting apps running on Xoom’s, instead of a room of developers wondering if they were pulled into a sales pitch to buy a Xoom and Atrix.

Well . . . . . I downloaded and got this:

I wasn’t overly impressed (Especially considering how one of the talks is on Android UI). So I mentioned to some of the guys over at Mubaloo we should code something up that evening to show a different approach to the app, showing how a.) you could get something much better b.) without spending too much time on it. But alas projects need finishing so it got put to one side, but after receiving a twitter comment from @motodev it just kicked me into gear, so this is the result of two hours of playing:

It’s by no means perfect (I’m not a designer in any way shape of form) but I’ve stuck a nice gradient behind the tiled honeycomb pattern, added an Action Bar with the Motodev logo, removed the horrible Android titlebar, added some images for colour and customised the button widgets.

I’m planning on moving the honeycomb logo and Gaunt Face logos about a bit, then code up a couple of list views for the country selection and the talks (Largely cos I’ve quite gotten into now that it’s started).

Pull using bazaar

Command to pull is
bzr branch lp:ubuntuone-android-files

Karni: ‘you hack, you do: bzr commit -m “what have you done”‘

bzr push lp:~gauntface/ubuntuone-android-files/the-branch-name-you-like

if you add new files (such as drawables, resources, etc), you need to do: bzr add (before you do bzr commit)

also. right after you bzr branch, you have to run the setup bash script, which downloads the necessary libs

if not, you’ll have to setup ssh key with launchpad, and tell bzr who you are with: bzr whoami

Ubuntu One Features List: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/mkarnicki/u1f