I have a simple little pet project (for Android), and one of the things I wanted to do was to to have a text field that would show me previous values as I typed in the text box (see screenshot below). Of course, this control is already a part of the Android SDK - it's our good friend the AutoCompleteTextView. To populate the drop-down, I have an SQLite table called vehicle_descriptions, which looks something like the screenshot below.
For those wanted the slide-decks and code from my talks at Prairie Developer's Conference 2011, you can find them up on GitHub. Thanks to all who attended. Maybe we'll see you again next year.
Just recently I switch my mobile carrier from Rogers to WIND Mobile. Their Holiday Miracle plan was just to good to pass up - even paying the penalty to break my Rogers contract I will still save money in the long run. Anyway, once the number got transferred over, I didn't have a 3G connection, even after selecting the WIND Home APN. After a bit of google, it seems that what I had to do is to setup an APN.
(Or, things to do when you have a sick kid)
One of the new data catalogues that the City of Edmonton has put up is the 2010 Election Results. This Thanksgiving Long Weekend I was kind of “grounded” at home when my son came down with a nasty inner ear infection. I was hanging out with him, and thought I could use the time to see how hard it would be and how quickly I could put together an Android application that would poll these results and show leading candidate in each contest for a given ward.
Last night I pushed a new build of YEG Buildings out to the Android Market. The two changes with this one:
Rather than showing the latitude/longitude of were you are, the application will try to translate that into a more human-friendly address. Note that the address might not be 100% accurate. It depends on how much accuracy the GPS has. The application no longer uses Google Maps and a KML feed when show where all the historical buildings in Edmonton are.
After a few months of neglect, I put a new version of my Edmonton Historical Buildings application up on the Android Market. I’ve renamed it to just YEG Buildings, as I’d like to eventually include buildings that aren’t historical, but interesting in general for some reason. The previous version had a nasty bug that would crash when you tried to view the location of a building on the map. Was one of those curious things where it worked in the emulator but not on a real device.
A while ago, I posted a blog article about using IntelliJ for Android development. Given that was a year ago, and one version of IntelliJ later, I thought I would do a follow up post. Long story short (and to sound like a TV commercial): I liked IntelliJ IDEA 9 so much, I bought a license.
Since I blogged last year, the Android plug-in for IntelliJ has really matured. I guess the only draw back to it is that you only get the Android plug-in when you buy the Unlimited Edition of IntelliJ – it’s not in the Community Edition.
Just to follow up on my last post about embedding Google Maps into your Android application (this part is kind of anti-climatic). So, by now you’ve signed your application. This is the “hardest” (i.e. busiest part) of the whole process. The next part, getting your Goggle apiKey, is the easy part. First you need to get the MD5 fingerprint of your keystore: keytool -list -alias androiddebugkey -keystore <path_to_debug_keystore>.keystore -storepass android -keypass android Once that is done, you and register for a Google Maps API key.
Thanks to all who attended my “Induction into the Android Army” talk this afternoon at the monthly Edmonton Java User’s Group meeting. I’d say it was a good turn out, especially when one considers that this is only the second monthly meeting for EJUG. It was a pretty basic talk, and didn’t dive to deeply into the “fun” Android stuff. If anybody from EJUG wants a follow up presentation that’s a bit more in depth, give a shout out on the EJUG mailing list.
Just a heads up for those interested: On Tuesday, June 15th the Edmonton Java User’s Group is having it’s monthly meeting at noon at the Canadian Western Bank Building. The speaker is none other than yours truly. I’ll be giving a brief introduction to application development to Android, using my trusty G1 and IntelliJ.
It’s free to attend, so stop by if you’re so inclined.
