android

Getting Started with Data Binding in Android

Tom Opgenorth
(Note: This is an updated version of a post from June, 2015) In May, 2015 at Google announced a data binding library for Android. The data binding library is currently in beta, so things might change and make what I am saying here irrelevant/obsolete. When in doubt, consult the official documentation. It’s long overdue – developers no longer have to come up with their own schemes for displaying or retrieving data from their views.

Nexus 5 Retrieving Shots from Shooting Chrony Beta Master

Tom Opgenorth
I spent a little bit of time since Christmas working on an Android application that will download velocities from my Shooting Chrony Beta Master. First I pair my Android phone to my Shooting Chrony via bluetooth. A couple of taps on the screen, and lo, shot data is retrieved: The app itself isn’t ready for public consumption, but as a proof of concept it is encouraging to see. I uploaded a video of this to YouTube so you can see the application in action.

Adding Bluetooth to your Shooting Chrony

Tom Opgenorth

If you’re into reloading, you know about chronographs. Odds are you might have a Shooting Chrony. I myself happen to own a Shooting Chrony Beta Master. These are pretty well made devices, and Shooting Chrony has a no nonsense replacement policy.

The only way to interact with the device is via a proprietary 9-pin-female RS-232 cable, like an old modem. Now, this techique was all the rage circa 1994 when dial-up internet was king and everybody had PC’s with two or more serial ports. This is really sub-par when you want to try and connect your smartphone to a Shooting Chrony (yes, this is possible, but more on this later).

Using Estimotes with Xamarin.Android

Tom Opgenorth

I recently bought some Estimote beacons (a 3rd party iBeacon-like device) - largely because they seem like a cool and nerdy kind of thing. It has an Android SDK which will allow Android devices to interaction with devices. With a little big of effort, I managed to create Xamarin.Android binding and port the sample Android project provided by the Estimote SDK.

You can see an example of the app in these screenshots:

image

Animate a ListView deletion in Xamarin.Android

Tom Opgenorth

A visually pleasant effect when deleting items from a ListView is to animate the row being deleted by gradually change the .Alpha value of the view from 1.0 to 0.0. If you’ve tried to animate the deletion of a row from a ListView in a Xamarin.Android application, you may observe some curious behaviour when rapidly scrolling through a ListView with many rows: the animation may appear on rows other than then one that is being deleted.

Writing GPS information to a JPEG

Tom Opgenorth

One of the handy things about the JPEG format is the ability to store meta-data inside the image using EXIF. There are a few libraries out there for the various programming languages that can help you out with this, and Android actually has something built in to the SDK - the class ExifInterface.

Google’s documentation on writing latitude and longitude to a JPEG are a bit light on details - they loosely hint at the format that latitude or longitude should have. (See the documentation for ExifInterface.TAG_GPS_LATITUDE). The API itself is pretty straight forward, but what Google doesn’t tell you is HOW the GPS coordinates should encoded.

rake your Xamarin.Android Application

Tom Opgenorth

Deploy early, deploy often is a popular goal in Agile methodologies. One easy way to support this to automate your build process. Last year at this time I would just use FinalBuilder to automate the builds of my Xamarin.Android pet projects. It doesn’t take much to set FinalBuilder, and it does provide support for a lot of tasks such as versioning .NET assemblies, manipulating XML, dealing with the file system, and so on.

The problem is that FinalBuilder is Windows only. OS X and Linux types are left out in the cold. As I find myself working almost exclusive in OS X when developing my Xamarin.Android applications, I was looking for a Windows free way to automate my builds.

Enter rake and albacore. rake is, of course the build system for Ruby.

Windows 8 64-bit and Android Debug Bridge (Where is my Galaxy Nexus?)

Tom Opgenorth

Setting up a new VM for development - this one based on Windows 8 64 bit. Not that I really want to, but it seems that I need to for work (yes, yes, first world problems). So the usual fun with standing up a new VM:

  • Install OS
  • Download Chrome and Firefox and ditch IE
  • Download Resharper
  • Remember that you need Visual Studio for Resharper so install that.
  • Install Java SDK
  • Install Android SDK
  • Install Intellij and Eclipse
  • etc.

Of course, then I notice that my phone, a Galaxy Nexus, isn’t being recognized by Android Debug Bridge. This is a problem as I much prefer to develop using a device as opposed slow emulator that Google ships for Android, and you can’t deploy to the device without ADB.

PreferenceFragment.getPreferencesFromIntent

Tom Opgenorth

One of the new classes that Honeycomb introduced was the PreferenceFragment. This class is meant to simplify the creatation of a setting / preferences screen in Android applications. It handles a lot of the displaying, saving, and changing of an application’s settings. There are a couple of ways to create a PreferenceFragment. The simplest way is to subclass, override onCreate() and then use either getPreferencesFromResource or getPreferencesFromIntent.

There are many examples on how to use getPreferencesFromResource, but I noticed that there aren’t that many on how to use getPreferencesFromIntent. Here is one such quick example.

Galaxy Nexus - Why don't you stay connected?

Tom Opgenorth
I recently got a Galaxy Nexus, and like a typical geek I unlocked the bootloader and then rooted it. Life was good running Android 4.0.1. Well sort of. I had problems tethering my MacBook Pro via the WiFi hotspot, but no problems using Bluetooth. So nothing I couldn’t work around. Then I received an OTA update to Android 4.0.4 recently. And this was when things started going not so good - specifically, for some blasted reason, I kept losing connectivity to Wind Mobile’s network.