My 3 Monitor Development Workstation

I’ve been working at home with my new company DigitalHarmonyGames.  I picked up a 2nd 23in monitor adding to my work Macbook Pro 17in I now have a triple monitor setup.  I have Unity3d running on one external, MonoDevelop on the other external and I do mail, skype and web surfing on the Laptop screen.  The 2nd external monitor was made possible by the $50 Cirago USB Display Adapter.  The USB adapter works great.  As long as I don’t run full-screen video or run anything that is too demanding on the usb connected monitor the setup works perfectly.

Android’s Fragmentation Problem

I like what Nick has to say about the complaints of having to support multiple devices/OSs/screen sizes on Android.

…Just like developing for iOS had an initial adjustment period, it takes time to learn the Android way of doing things. Developers and designers who are unwilling to invest that time just end up creating crappy clones of their iPhone apps.

To those folks, I can only say: remember when you bristled at seeing second-rate Mac ports of popular Windows apps? Remember how you felt about companies that treated your choice of OS as an also-ran?

Sure if I had a choice I’d prefer not to have to worry about different configurations, but that is the appeal of Android. Just like Windows gave users more choices compared to Mac, so does Android compared to IOS.

Learn JavaScript

CodeAcademy has a nice step by step web based tutorial on JavaScript.

Android REST client applications

The Qliq Android application uses an architecture described in this Google presentation.

A ContentProvider gives access to data retrieved via REST services and cached in a SQLite database.   It is a pretty elegant solution though at times it seems to suffer some performance issues in terms of timely screen updates.

There is a lot to learn about Android.  There is more than one way to solve a problem and the Android SDK provides many patterns and components to get the job done.  The best way to learn is to see how others have solved problems and to simply dive in and try things out.

I recently came across ORMLite as an alternative to SQLite.  Don’t know much about it. I wonder how much use it has on the Android platform.

I don’t always test my code

oDesk

I got some part time work using oDesk in 2009 and had a very good experience.

Reviews: 1 2

Android Development

I’m sticking my toe into Android Development

Here are some reference links

How to install non-market apps

What version of Android should you develop for?  Many say develop to the oldest version that you can in order to support the biggest market share.  However the older versions are only in a small % of the phones.  The newest versions of Android are not supported in many phones yet.  The sweet spot in my opinion starts at 10% coverage which today is 2.1.  Visit this site for the latest stats.

Tutorials

Setting up application with multiple tabs

UI/Application Exerciser Monkey

Traceview for app profiling

Creating custom title bars

High CPU Utilization and Threads

If you implement an infinite loop in a thread you may see 50% to 100% CPU utilization. This is because even though your thread may not be doing anything waiting for some event, you are still getting CPU slices unless you make a call to give up the CPU. This is easily done by calling a sleep function such as Thread.Sleep(5000) // milliseconds

Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture

The problem is when you try to declare a class, enum or anything else before you declare the main form class then it generates runtime error because the resource manifest point to an incorrect location.

DataGridView

I’ve been working a lot lately with the DataGridView.  One instance of a DataGridView would refuse to be editable even though I checked all the relevant settings (Enabled, EditMode, ReadOnly, RowTemplate.ReadOnly, Columns.ReadOnly).   I had previously missed the RowTemplate.ReadOnly setting  and had it working once I set it to false, but then it stopped working again.  I found that removing the set property for the data members that were specified in the Column Properties DataPropertyName value, was the reason it stopped working.  Kinda makes sense but I wish there was better feedback from VisualStudio to alert me of the mismatched settings.