Scottyab's blog

programming, mobile apps, running and me

Android PagerAdapter X of Y

Apr 16

Posted by scottyab in android | No Comments

Recently saw NumericPageIndicator noted in the Android developer weekly email and thought I’d share my simpler solution to having page X of Y in a view

Gmail's X of Y pager

Gmail’s X of Y pager

pager indicator.

PagerAdapter X of Y. When using a view pager you can simply override the getPageTitle to create a page x of y text as seen in apps like gmail. This was used in a app to swipe through the RSS stories with android.support.v4.app.FragmentPagerAdapter.

Alternatively you could use something like https://github.com/ManuelPeinado/NumericPageIndicator 

Gist after the break 
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Being a successful apps developer

Mar 17

Posted by scottyab in android, personal | 2 Comments

After judging the Bristol Uni Computer society Appathon a couple of weeks ago, several students approached me with career related questions and I thought I’d collect them up and post them. These are purely my personal views not that of Mubaloo. When I’m talking about App developer I’m meaning native app development.Treehouse_QA

Also I jotted this down in a hurry as the students needed to include some of the comments in an assignment. So expect spelling mistakes!!

What’s your favorite and worst aspect of your job?

Best bits:

  • Developing apps used by millions of people (having great designer to make them look great)
  • As head of Android I’m the go to person for Android and I shape how the company approaches the density of devices.
  • working in team with motivated and talented people – it really makes a difference when team mates are all pulling to the same goals.

Worse/challenges

  • Trying to estimate how long a app will take to make based on limited details/requirements
  • Personally I find logging time to projects tedious, it should be simple but the software is clunky at best – but in all the companies I’ve worked the time tracking tools have been subpar. – someone should write a easy to use app for it! :)
  • Being point of contact, has it’s downsides mainly lots of interruptions which can make focused development (the bit i really love) difficult.

How would you describe your company (business area, number of employees, approx number of Countries operated in)

errrm, RTM… check the website for that www.mubaloo.com

Day to day taks and in general what does a typical working day consists (design work vs paper work vs talking with clients vs actual coding etc)

  • reviewing design documents,
  • writing specification,
  • meetings with clients to dsicuss current project progress or future project developments
  • fixing defects raised in defect tracking system
  • Writing code meet specification/design

But wait, there’s more Q and A

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Hardening your Android app at Devoxx UK

Mar 8

Posted by scottyab in android | 1 Comment

 

Really chuffed my talk on Hardening your Android app ws accepted at Devoxx UK on 26th/27th March. Devoxx is a diverse conference for all Java technologies, so come along a say hi. Feel free to use the 10% off code  SPUK13.

DevoxxUK_SpeakerBadge_400x400

What’s in the talk:

  • Encryption and key management on Android
  • Using SSL better
  • Android Permissions made easy
  • Make it harder to pirate/repackage your app

Plus a bunch of other tips I’ve picked up along the way.

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My android rss feeds

Feb 7

Posted by scottyab in Uncategorized | No Comments

After am Android developer friend of mine Dori published his Google Read Android RSS folder. I thought I’d follow suit and publish mine.

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F10942409195818074904%2Flabel%2Fandroid

It’s a catch all folder for Android development, news and interesting dev blogs.

Enjoy

Making apps is awesome at BCS Xmas event with Raspberry Pi

Dec 7

Posted by scottyab in android, tech | No Comments

Chris (@chrisjenx) and I spoke at the BCS Bristol xmas event at @bristol last night along side Rob Mullins from Raspberry Pi. We talked about how awesome it is to work in technology as a programmer and develop apps at Mubaloo. So forgot those crappy spreadsheets they teach you at school and get cracking with the real fun stuff.

Check out App Inventor for a place to create your first Android app. http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/
Getting started with Android development check out the official dev site here https://developer.android.com/index.html

Presentation slides after the break
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What’s new Android 4.2

Nov 30

Posted by scottyab in android, tech | No Comments

This is my slides from last nights SWmobile meetup.

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Write less / do more – Droidcon 2012

Nov 1

Posted by scottyab in android | No Comments

Here’s a copy of the Write less do more presentation I gave at Droidcon 2012. Really enjoyable event met some great people!

Thanks for all the positive feedback

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Apps World winners

Oct 7

Posted by scottyab in android | No Comments

Great time at Apps world and we even picked up a few awards!!!  also enjoyed speaking about Enterprise app security.

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Useful Mac osx tips

Aug 12

Posted by scottyab in android | 1 Comment

After a recent hard disk failure I found myself hunting around for the various system config things and thought I’d blog it to ensure I knew where to look next time and to maybe save someone 5mins.

Backup Documents folder to Dropbox

An easy way to ensure you docs on mac are safe is to Create a Symlink from to Documents to a folder in Dropbox. Assuming you have Dropbox installed to the standard place in your home dir. Open the terminal type:
ln -s ~/Documents/ ~/Dropbox/MyMacDocs

That’s it, all done. You should she the files and folder start to sync

Add adb to Path so you can use it in the terminal

If like me your an android dev you know its useful to access adb from the terminal. Heres how…. Create a file called .profile in your user dir (~/ or /Users/<;user.name>;/) Open the .profile file and add the following line:

export PATH=/Users/<;user.name>;/android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools:$PATH

Now restart the terminal and type adb version

If all went ok you should get the following response Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.29

Show hidden files

Another useful thing todo on mac is to show hidden files. Open the terminal type:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

To push or not to push

Aug 9

Posted by scottyab in android | No Comments

Had a interesting webinar from Urban Airship yesterday, for those who don’t know Urban airship are the market leaders in push and have been around 3 years and send 4 billion push messages a month. With some impressive clients I think of them as the Mubaloo of push

They have effectively build a CMS (for a marketing peeps) on top of the push messaging technologies from Apple (Apple Push Notification) and Google (Google Cloud 2 Device Messaging which is now Google Cloud Messaging). The CMS offers easy way for non techies to create push messages and target specific groups of users (segments) as well as pretty analytics style graphs to show success of messages, opt in rate etc. They also offer predefined geo fenced areas and they can also create custom geo fence areas that can be added to segment. The example they talked about was push message for groupon voucher when you’re near a store.

Urban airship sell them selves as a solution to making apps more sticky and increasing engagement. Personally I lean towards make a great app with great content and that will keep users coming back. I’m sure some marketing and advertises would disagree but blanket none individual/user relevant push messages are irritating. Push is great native/wrapped app feature I’d definitely encourage people to add to their apps. However the need to target segments of users with relevant messages is essential if not then including push for the sake of it seems pointless.

Integrating urban airship into apps is a easy peasy with their SDKs.