Wiebe Elsinga

MWC 2012

W.Elsinga — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:48:15 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:48:23 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:40:50 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:40:28 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:14:11 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:37:00 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:03:44 +0000

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

W.Elsinga — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:05:37 +0000

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();
}

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

W.Elsinga — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:19:40 +0000

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)

W.Elsinga — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:52:00 +0000

Google has (finally) released its Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) software development kit (SDK). So let’s take a closer look.

Ice Cream Sandwich for Users

The new features for users in Ice Cream Sandwich are detailed on the Android Developers website. To summarize, those are as follows:

Evolved UI
New typeface optimized for high-resolution screens
System Bar Refinements contains virtual buttons for better user experience
Action Bar like features
Resizable widgets
Improved voice input engine
Better control over network data
People app offers richer profile information, including a large profile picture, phone numbers, addresses and accounts, status updates, events, and a new button for connecting on integrated social networks.
Improved Calendar, Camera, Email and Browser apps
Android Beam for sharing across two NFC-enabled devices
Face Unlock is a new screen-lock option that lets users unlock their devices with their faces
Wi-Fi Direct lets users connect directly to nearby peer devices over Wi-Fi
Connecting to Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) devices so users can connect to wireless medical devices and sensors in hospitals, fitness centers, homes, and elsewhere.

Ice Cream Sandwich for Developers

Developers need to be aware of the following features:

Unified UI framework for phones, tablets, and more. All the UI elements from Honeycomb, like the action bar and fragments
New social API
new APIs for Contacts, Calendar, and Visual Voicemail
audio remote control API so any music or media app can register to receive media button events from the remote control and then manage play state
spell-checker API
Android Beam so you can Share just about everything over NFC by tapping two phones together (like the bump app)
ShareActionProvider widget lets developers quickly embed standard share functionality and UI in the Action Bar of their applications
Low-level streaming multimedia (sounds a bit like DRM)
New camera capabilities like continuous focus and image zoom. There’s also face detection.
Wi-Fi Direct for ad-hoc networking
Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) For connecting to medical or fitness devices like the MotoActive.
GridLayout improves the performance of Android applications by supporting flatter view hierarchies that are faster to layout and render
Hardware-accelerated 2D drawing
About a million other things – Stylus support, a new framework for text-to-speech engines, data usage, a VPN API, and policy management for the camera.

Source developer.android.com