#android

I was surprised to find that there wasn’t a DashClock extension for my Nest thermostat, so I made one. If you haven’t used DashClock before, check it out and if you like it and have a Nest, give my extension a shot.

DashClock Nest Extension on Google Play

To make proper use of both Fragment arguments and saved instance state in Android, I found myself frequently writing a great deal of the same boilerplate code. Most of that code looked like this: public class EditEntryFragment extends Fragment { private Entry entry; private String title; private boolean hasAgreedToTerms = false; public static EditEntryFragment createInstance(Entry currentEntry, String title) { EditEntryFragment fragment = new EntryEditFragment(); Bundle args = new Bundle(); args.putParcelable("entry", currentEntry); args. [Read More]

With recent surge in adoption of the new Gradle-based Android build system, it’s easier than ever to incorporate Android library projects (and libraries in general) into your project. Gone are the days of complex pom files, submodules, forked repos, a huge libs folder or worst of all, copying code as-is into your repo (you never did that, right?). Now a full Android library or utility can be included with a one-line addition to your build. [Read More]

RoboGuice is a fantastic dependency injection framework for Android that wraps Google’s Guice DI library with a set of helper classes and default injections that can make an Android developer’s life much easier. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. Guice was not designed with mobile devices in mind and instead targets servers where objects startup is long but once you’re up, responses need to be quick. Because of this, startup times for apps using RoboGuice can be noticably long in the best case and uncomfortably long if you’re not careful. [Read More]

Anyone who has used a dependency injection (DI) framework on a project can likely speak to its benefits when creating complex systems. Relying on it can help an engineer to design and implement clean, testable software. Anyone who has tried to write Android applications using a DI framework has likely been disappointed in some degree with current offerings. DI frameworks in Java have largely been written with server architectures in mind and as such are either generally too resource heavy to work on a mobile device. [Read More]

On a recent project I’m working on with my AppJour team, we chose to use the DateSlider widget for date selection in lieu of the standard DatePicker and TimePicker views provided in the Android SDK. The installation instructions involve copy-pasting various layouts and java files in with our source. While that may work, it clutters our res folders and introduces source code that we don’t want to take explicit ownership of. [Read More]

As part of my current practicum project at CM-SV, I was asked to put together a prototype that demonstrates the capabilities of Google’s Cloud To Device Messaging (C2DM) service, or push notifications. What follows was the result: https://github.com/patrickbaumann/c2dmprototype c2dmprototype consists of two applications: a relatively vanilla Django server application (the Cloud part of C2DM) and an Android 2.2 application (the device part of C2DM). The demo aims to demonstrate the basic pieces of a “push to talk” application by allowing a user to send audio messages to devices by pushing them instead of requiring the battery-limited phone to poll the server. [Read More]