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My little project is made of 3 modules: a parent Maven project – for keeping things together, an Android project for the application logic and ui and an Android project for running integration tests with Robotium. In some cases (e.g. you want to have a common base code and then 2 different ui implementations for [...]
Continue ReadingI’ve recently started working on a new Android project and my first task was to set up a continuous integration and testing environment. For a normal java project, this is not such a big deal. For Android however, I found out that’s not the case…or maybe it’s just me So let’s start with the basics [...]
Continue ReadingThe Asmack is a patch of the Smack XMPP client library that has some fixes for Android. You can dig up what these patches are by reading this thread on Android Developers. Anyway, there are numerous tutorials on how to integrate this library in an Android project, which is pretty simple (just download their jar [...]
Continue ReadingThe few past months have been really interesting for me personally and professionally as well. I’ve made the move to a bigger city (London) and started working in a bigger company, in an innovation environment that’s pretty impressive I’m really excited to find out how this will improve my developer abilities I was struggling the [...]
Continue ReadingContinuing on the same topic of saving the state of a fragment across screen flips, I’ve recently encountered a rather strange issue. I wanted a fragment representing a simple form, with a bunch of TextView as labels and EditText as fields. The real case scenario involved fetching some data over the network and based on [...]
Continue ReadingSince the introduction of Loaders in Honeycomb and Compatibility Library, the Android world has changed for the better. However, it took me quite some time to dissect and understand the rather scarce documentation about how to work with these on special cases, like the hated case of screen configuration change – aka screen flips. It turns [...]
Continue ReadingIn a Android application I wanted to use Scanner class to read a list of floats from a text file (it’s a list of vertex coordinates for OpenGL). Exact code is: It seems however that this is incredibly slow (it took 30 minutes to read 10,000 floats!) – as tested on the 2.1 emulator. Run [...]
Continue ReadingIn the 2009 Google I/O talk about writing real-time games for Android it is recommended that for performance we don’t use interfaces. Supposedly the calls through an interface reference are about 30% slower. It is also mentioned that calls to static methods are faster. In these circumstances, i asked myself if all calls to a [...]
Continue ReadingI’ve been recently using the Android Compatibility Library in a project where I found myself in the need for a tabbed layout, in which each of the tab’s children would be a fragment. The usual way to do this is for the activity you need the tabs in to extend TabActivity. However, if you want to [...]
Continue ReadingSome time ago I contributed to an app for Android which had to manage a lot of Google map OverlayItems. The Google API support and performance for overlay items is satisfactory while you have a manageable amount of items but gets messy if you have lots and lots of items. Further more, it seems that [...]
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