Installing Google Go on Ubuntu 10.04 and building a simple Web Server

September 2nd, 2010

The Go programming language was introduced a while back and caught a lot of attention and excitement. As the website explains, Go is a simple, fast, concurrent, safe and open source systems programming language. I decided recently to give Go a whirl and installed it on Ubuntu 10.04. Today I’ll point out a few tips I found along the way of installing, building and running Go.

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Android: A bare bones way to access App Engine

August 20th, 2010

This is day five of my “five days of Android articles“. Today I’m going to modify yesterday’s example (Android: Using RestClient to communicate with Google App Engine) to access the Google App Engine project via a different way, a little more “bare bones” if you will. There is usually more than one way to do something so this article is to broaden the horizon bit. Personally I like the RestClient but today like I said is about a different approach.

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Android: Using RestClient to communicate with Google App Engine

August 19th, 2010

This is day four of my “five days of Android articles“. I recently stumbled upon RestClient which was created by Luke Lowrey. RestClient really makes calling web services very easy from Android as you can see from Luke’s article. Today I’m going to use RestClient to communicate to Google App Engine.

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Android: Quickly building a menu for an application

August 18th, 2010

This is day three of my “five days of Android articles“. Today I’m going to focus on menus, the Android website has a good starter tutorial which I’ll borrow some ideas from. Unfortunately my icons on the menus will not be anything fancy since I’m not a graphics person so I just punched up a couple icons in Photoshop just to serve well enough for this example. Make sure to actually follow Google’s Android icon guidelines and templates for production quality graphics.

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Android: Using the EditText

August 17th, 2010

This is day two of my “five days of Android articles“. Today I’ll go over a commonly used widget in the Android SDK – the EditText. The Android documentation describes the EditText as: “EditText is a thin veneer over TextView that configures itself to be editable”. It is a subclass of TextView.

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Android: Using the built-in fonts and adding effects

August 16th, 2010

This is the first article in my “five days of Android articles“.

Currently Android has a few built-in fonts that can be easily harnessed in your applications. Today I’m going to quickly go over how to use these as well as some added effects like creating shadows, bold, italic, colors, etc.

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Five days of Android articles coming next week!

August 10th, 2010

Next week (Aug. 16-20, 2010) I will be publishing one article per day on the topic of working with Android and creating some projects to learn from.

Day 1 is now posted.
Day 2 is now posted.
Day 3 is now posted.
Day 4 is now posted.
Day 5 is now posted.

Android: Displaying a status bar notification message

August 5th, 2010

I recently was asked how to use Notifications for Android. The demo on the Android documentation page is a great start so I wrote a very quick application to demo how to use it.

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Using SQLite with Android to power an AutoComplete textbox

August 2nd, 2010

I haven’t seen a lot of tutorials on using SQLite with Android. Sure there are some out there, but not too many real basic ones. Today I’ll create a simple Android project that uses the built-in SQLite capabilities of Android and then use the data inside the SQLite database to populate values for an autocomplete textbox. Some of the AutoComplete code I’ll use from the Google Android Docs located here.

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Using Android’s WebView, WebChromeClient and WebViewClient to load a webpage and display the progress

July 26th, 2010

I’ve been working with the Android SDK and Eclipse tools for a while now. The article today won’t be the most fantastic Android application out there but it will show some potential on how you could harness WebView for your own applications.

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