Wiebe Elsinga
Blog
MWC 2012
0February 9, 2012
by W.Elsinga
From the 26th of February to the 1st of March 2012 I’ll be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Hall 2.1 is dedicated entirely to Apps and promises to be the most interesting part of this exhibition which hosted over 50000 visitors last year. I welcome you to drop by and have a chat at stand 2.1E67.
Implementing the ViewPager
0January 6, 2012
by W.Elsinga
Looking for improved Android UI experience, I came across the ViewPager. Look at the native Android Market and you will see a ViewPager implementation in action.
Basically you can implement scrolling sets of views. It was released as part of the Compatibility Package (revision 3) and can be implemented for Android 1.6 and upwards. Add “Swipey Tabs“, as Kirill Grouchnikov explained, to your implementation and it completes the user experience.
Have a look at this example (made by Peter Kuterna) of an implementation of Swipey Tabs on top of a ViewPager
Droidcon NL, an impression
1November 25, 2011
by W.Elsinga
It’s been a wonderful and exciting two days of enjoying the first ever Droidcon in the Netherlands. Not only did I talk to a lot of people about the DutchAUG, I also had the chance to give a presentation about “Prototyping your Android application”. Let me give you some of the highlights of droidconNL.
Introduction DutchAUG
Before the keynote was given, Johan Pelgrim (@jowipe), announced the formation of the Dutch Android User group. Besides the fact that I’m co-organizer, it’s important to join this group because of the power that a community can give to an individual.
Source: Jaime Visser
Nick Butcher (Google)
Nick Butcher (@crafty) is an Android Developer Advocate, working at Google’s London office. He reminded us, Android Developers, that the time of creating wonderful Android apps is over, they need to be awesome. During his opening keynote and while talking about ICS, he gave a demo about Android Beam, and it worked (always exiting, a live demo).
Source: stevechippy
Jens Mücke (Xing)
Jens Mücke (@jensmuecke) is a Senior Software Engineer at XING. He gave an inside view on how to become a Mobile company. I must say, not all points mentioned I can concur, but it’s always interesting to hear other companies talk about their strategy.
Novoda
Novoda (@novoda) is an Android consultancy company based in London. Presenters Jamie McDonald, Luigi Agosti, Carl-Gustaf Harroch and Gonçalo Silva gave a talk about using Continuous Integration. It’s funny to see that they have the same setup as we, ItudeMobile, use. I must thank them because they helped me with one problem I had with Jenkins.
Me
And than it was my turn to talk about prototyping. Thanks everybody for attending my talk.
Source: Jaime Visser
Christine Karman
Christine Karman (@Xtien) is a Senior Software Engineer. She described, by way of clear code examples the use of RoboGuice. Great presentation.
Richard Hyndman
Richard Hyndman (@geekyouup) also an Android Developer Advocate, working at Google’s London office. He took the audience on a journey. Starting at the beginning of this year, telling how well Android is doing, until what the future holds for Android.
Conclusion
For the first ever droidcon in Amsterdam, they have done their best to make a good first impression. Some tweaking still needs to be done, but will be there next year. For enyone that’s interested in my talk, here’s my presentation
Link: Hints and tips to improve Android code
0November 15, 2011
by W.Elsinga
So, you are looking to improve the performance of an Android application. Besides using tools like MAT and StrictMode it’s a good idea to look at general improvements to speed up your application.
The link below provides some hints and tips to help create efficient code. This article focuses on the Android-platform, but it also contains a lot of general tips to keep the code efficient.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/design/performance.html
Android Best Practices: MAT
0October 31, 2011
by W.Elsinga
When you want to improve an Android application performance, you need to do profiling. Welcome MAT!
What is MAT?
It’s a Java heap analyzer tool introduced by Eclipse that helps you find memory leaks.
How-To
First you need to extract a hprof file from the Android device. When running the device select the Dump HPROF file option as shown here
Convert the .hprof file from the Dalvik format to the J2SE HPROF format. You can do this using the hprof-conv tool provided in the Android SDK.
hprof-conv dump.hprof converted-dump.hprof
Import the converted hprof file into MAT, and start anaylzing
Must read: ItudeMobile
0October 27, 2011
by W.Elsinga
Did you look at the media channels of Itude Mobile already?. You don’t know Itude Mobile!
From 2005 Itude Mobile has provided mobile websites and mobile applications to a variety of organisations such as Cordys, BinckBank, Alex.nl and content providers such as Tonetastic. These applications and websites provide complex and highly integrated functions to consumers in a secure and user-friendly way.
Here are their channels
Update: Android SDK Tools r15 And ADT 15
0October 27, 2011
by W.Elsinga
As some of you already may have noticed, the new Android 4.0 SDK Tools and ADT 14 contained some manor bugs. For example a scrolling issue in the new Logcat or the not so complete changes they made regarding Android Library projects (apkLib). If you are interested in the complete list have a look here.
Luckily Google worked hard last week, and yesterday they released Android SDK Tools r15 And ADT 15, which fixes a lot of bugs.
Continue Reading Here
For Developers: Android SDK Tools r15 And ADT 15 Bug Fixers Now Available
Android Best Practices: StrictMode
0October 26, 2011
by W.Elsinga
When developing Android applications that uses network and database access, you need to do performance tuning. This is where StrictMode comes in handy
StrictMode?
StrictMode is used to detect memory leaks. It’s has introduced in Gingerbread and can be used as a development tool.
The configuration below was the proposed in the reference documentation:
public void onCreate() {
if (DEVELOPER_MODE) {
StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder()
.detectDiskReads()
.detectDiskWrites()
.detectNetwork() // or .detectAll() for all detectable problems
.penaltyLog()
.build());
StrictMode.setVmPolicy(new StrictMode.VmPolicy.Builder()
.detectLeakedSqlLiteObjects()
.detectLeakedClosableObjects()
.penaltyLog()
.penaltyDeath()
.build());
}
super.onCreate();
}
if (DEVELOPER_MODE) {
StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder()
.detectDiskReads()
.detectDiskWrites()
.detectNetwork() // or .detectAll() for all detectable problems
.penaltyLog()
.build());
StrictMode.setVmPolicy(new StrictMode.VmPolicy.Builder()
.detectLeakedSqlLiteObjects()
.detectLeakedClosableObjects()
.penaltyLog()
.penaltyDeath()
.build());
}
super.onCreate();
}
Update If you’re looking on how to get StrictMode working for all Android platform versions, have a look at this article.
Don’t forget the tools
0October 18, 2011
by W.Elsinga
Besides the release Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) software development kit (SDK) don’t forget the new SDK Tools and ADT 14.
The new features for the SDK tools and ADT are listed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:
- Improved Eclipse Welcome wizard
- Build system improvements like a new library system and a faster Ant build
- Webcam support for the Android 4.0 system image. Windows/Linux only. Works with 1 or 2 webcams. Hope Mac support will come soon.
- New custom XML Formatter
- New logcat view
- Asset Studio integration in Eclipse
- Improved new Project and new XML wizards
- New UI for the SDK Manager
Source developer.android.com
A closer look at Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
0October 18, 2011
by W.Elsinga
Google has (finally) released its Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) software development kit (SDK). So let’s take a closer look.