Developing Android Apps – Part 2 – Week one – My notes

This week, I was not able to attend the full class due to time constraint, since I returned from a vacation on Tuesday. So my notes will not be as detailed as it used to be. I will try to provide detailed notes next week.

Getting authenticated with oAuth

So basically this week, Tony explained how to setup oAuth authentication, so that we can use the Twitter API without explicitly asking for password from the users.

In order to set it up, we have to first register for an app from Twitter. You can follow the screencast at the end of last week’s notes to do that.

Twitter4J

The next step is to include the Twitter4J jar. You can download it from the project homepage and then you have to copy it to the /lib directory of your android project. If you are using windows, then you can follow the steps given in this forum post to add Twitter4J to your android project.

Source code

You can access the source code for this week’s class from the official github repository.

See you all next week with detailed notes 🙂

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Developing Android Apps – Part 2 – Overview – My notes

As I mentioned before, Creative tech is conducting part 2 of the Developing Android App class. Like Part 1, I am planning to post my notes here so that it would be helpful for others too.

Introduction

This week, we had the Overview session by Tony (the presenter). The training started off with a brief explanation of the concepts that were covered in Part 1. Tony then explained briefly about Twitter and the explained what are the things that will be covered in the next 5 classes.

The following is the schedule for the next 5 weeks.

Week one

  • Getting Authenticated with Twitter
  • oAuth
  • Twitter4J
  • Webview and webview Client

Week two

  • Advanced ListView
  • List headers and footers
  • Concurrent Programming with Threads
  • Handlers

Week Three

  • Tweeting from App
  • Creating menus
  • Using AsynTask to run many Concurrent tasks
  • Posting tweets

Week Four

  • Adding style to the App
  • Themes
  • Styles
  • Selectors and XML Graphics
  • Designing for multiple screen dimensions

Week Five

  • Posting photos from the app
  • Getting photos from the library
  • Getting photos from the Camera
  • Posting photos with twitpic4J

Homework

The homework for this week is to register an application and get authentication keys to use oAuth with Twitter. This has to be done before the next week class so that you can use to try next week’s code.

Tony has created the following screencast which explains the process of registering your application with Twitter.

There are lot of really interesting things lined up and I am very excited about this course. See you next week 🙂

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin now supports shortcodes

One of the most requested features for my Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin was the support for shortcodes. Finally I got some free time over the weekend and was able to implement it.

Shortcodes

In addition to supporting sidebar widgets and template tags, the Posts by Tag WordPress now also support shorcodes.

You can embed a list of posts from a set of tags by using the following shortcode anywhere in your post or page.

In addition to using the tags attribute, you can also use other attributes that are supported by the template tag. For the full list checkout the readme file or the Plugins homepage.

Ability to sort by title

In addition to the support for shortcodes, I have also added the ability to sort by post title in this release. You can choose to sort by title in the sidebar widget or specify in the $order_by param to the template tag or as an attribute to the shortcode.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Android on iPhone

Yes, you read the title correctly. Now it is possible to run Android on iPhone (and can have flash too 😉 )

Planentbeing from linux on iphone project has successfully ported Android to run on iPhone. You can see the following video where he demos dual booting iPhone with android.

Man, seriously this guy is a genius and I really adore his reverse engineering skills.

You can also download pre-built images and source and can try it out, if you have an old iPhone lying around.

Posted in Android/Java, Apple/Mac/iDevices | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Free online course on developing android applications using Java – Part 2

CreativeLive who conducted a free 6 weeks course on developing Android applications with Java are back again with a follow up course. The part 2 course is also a 6 weeks course (like part 1) and will be conducted by Tony Hillerson, who also conduced the first course.

In this course, a Twitter client would be created and will cover OAuth, access the Twitter APIs, and also how to post photos to Twitter amount other things.

The part 2 of this course is also free to watch live, like the first course. You can check out the schedule in the official page.

If you have attended the first course or if you are interested in Android, then do register for the course, at the official page and follow it up. 🙂

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

10 Open Source Android Apps which every Android developer must look into

I used to read code from popular open source projects to see how others implement certain functionalities and also to learn from them. (I am a firm believer of the fact that you have to read good code to write good code)

Recently I have been following up a couple of good open source Android apps and thought of listing them here so that it could be useful for others.

Update: I have updated this list with a new set of apps, which have come out recently. Check out them as well.

Sample Apps by Android Team

Could there be a better way to start without looking at the code of the developers who developed the framework? 😉 These are 15 different android sample apps created by the core developers of the Android framework. These include a couple of games, photostream, time display, home screen shortcuts etc.

url : http://code.google.com/p/apps-for-android/

Remote Droid

RemoteDroid is an android app which turns your phone into a wireless keyboard and mouse with touchpad, using your own wireless network. You can learn lot of things like connecting to a network, controlling user finger movement etc from its source.

url: http://code.google.com/p/remotedroid/

TorProxy and Shadow

TorProxy is an implementation of Tor for Android mobiles. Together with Shadow, it allows you to browse website anonymously from your mobile phone. You can learn about tunnelling socket connections, managing cookies etc by reading its source code.

url: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/code/svn/android-tor/ and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/android/tor/

Android SMSPopup

It is an Android app that intercepts incoming text messages and displays them in a popup window. Apart from being a time saver, this app also shows us how to interface with the built-in app that manages SMS.

url: http://code.google.com/p/android-smspopup/

Standup Timer

Standup Timer is an Android application that acts as a simple, stand-up meeting stop watch. It can be used to ensure your stand-up meeting finishes on time, and gives all the participants an equal share of time to state their progress. You can learn how to use the timer functionality by reading the source code. Also this apps has clear distinction between view, model etc and has lot of util methods which we can reuse in our app.

url: http://github.com/jwood/standup-timer

Foursquare

It is a four square client for android. This app is basically divided into two components; Reading the source code you can find out how to make

url: http://code.google.com/p/foursquared/

Pedometer

The pedometer app tries to take the number of steps you take every day. Even though the count is not accurate, you can learn different things like interacting with accelerometer, doing voice updates, running background services etc by reading its source code.

url: http://code.google.com/p/pedometer/

opensudoku-android

OpenSudoku is a simple open source sudoku game. You can learn how to display things in a grid in your view and also how to interact with a website by reading its source code.

url: http://code.google.com/p/opensudoku-android/

ConnectBot

ConnectBot is a Secure Shell client for the Android platform. There are lot of good things about this app’s source code. Check it out for yourself 🙂

http://code.google.com/p/connectbot/

WordPress for Android

How can you expect a list of apps from me without mentioning WordPress 😉 This android app is from the official WordPress development team. You can learn how to make XMLRPC calls (in addition to other cool things) by reading its source code.

url: http://android.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/

If you got any good open source android apps from which we can learn something, then do leave a comment and I will add them up here, till then happy reading 🙂

Update: I have updated this list with a new set of apps, which have come out recently. Check out them as well.

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , | 144 Comments

jQuery.later – a setTimeout wrapper in jQuery

Recently I have been playing around with YUI 3 and found that it had a nice wrapper for setTimeout/setInterval which nicely encapsulated it.

I thought it would be nice to have a wrapper like that for jQuery, which led to this nice little Plugin for jQuery called jQuery Later

Download

You can download it from my github page. It also includes a html page which tells you how to use it.

Syntax

jQuery later function follows the same syntax as that of YUI.

jQuery.later ( when , o , fn , data , periodic )

Executes the supplied function in the context of the supplied object ‘when’ milliseconds later. Executes the function a single time unless periodic is set to true.

Parameters:
when <int> the number of milliseconds to wait until the fn is executed.
o <object> the context object.
fn <Function|String> the function to execute or the name of the method in the ‘o’ object to execute.
data <object> [Array] data that is provided to the function. This accepts either a single item or an array. If an array is provided, the function is executed with one parameter for each array item. If you need to pass a single array parameter, it needs to be wrapped in an array [myarray].
periodic <boolean> if true, executes continuously at supplied interval until canceled.
Returns: object
a timer object. Call the cancel() method on this object to stop the timer.

License

Released under MIT License

PS: BTW this is my first jQuery Plugin. 🙂

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Ability to hide author name in Posts By Tag Plugin

Another day another update to one of my WordPress Plugins. 🙂

This time it is Posts By Tag Plugin. I have updated it to v0.6 and have added the ability to prevent the author name from getting displayed in the widget. Normally in single user blogs it doesn’t make much sense to display the author name (since all are going to be the same user).

In the new version, you have to ability to choose whether you want the author name to be displayed or not.

Screenshot

The following is the screenshot of the new widget admin area.

post-by-tags-wordpress-plugin

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s homepage.

Feedback

Please keep the feedback coming and if you want me to add any new features or find a bug, please leave a comment.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Bulk Delete now supports deleting private posts

Just now released an update to my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin, which you can use to delete posts in bulk. This update adds support for deleting private posts.

All the private posts can be deleted in bulk in one go or they can be filtered based on categories or tags.

Like the previous updates, this feature was also requested by the users of the Plugin. So if you have any feedback or feature request, don’t hesitate to contact me, I will try to add them to the Plugin.

Screenshot

bulk-delete-wordpress-plugin

bulk-delete-wordpress-plugin-2

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below or contact me.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Display Twitter profile image instead of Gravatar in WordPress comments

In the recent release of RoloPress I implemented Twitter avatar, which allows you to show the user’s Twitter profile image instead of Gravatar. I adapted it into a separate Plugin called Twitter Avatar Reloaded so that it can be used in normal WordPress installations too.

Features

When the Plugin is installed it automatically adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username. You don’t need to edit the theme file at all. Isn’t that cool enough 😉

Screenshot

twitteravatarwordpressplugin[1]

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

PS: BTW RoloPress 1.2 has been released with lot of new features. Don’t forget to check it out. 🙂

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments