My little software warehouse

2014

Aug 24

Migrating from blogger to octopress done

It feels a bit like this but when I had to write a new blogpost and had to embed some code snippets into my blogger hosted blog, I got so pissed of that I chose to migrate my existing blog to a github hosted instance of octopress. Jason Jarrett made a pretty nice tutorial about the whole process here. However, I had to change a couple of things and I thought those might be helpful to anybody who …

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Apr 8

Generating preloaded sqlite data

Preloading data in Sqlite is a common problem during android development. The most common solutions are: hardcode the insert statements and execute them (possibly inside a transaction) the first time the db is openedplace the data inside a csv file, load it the first time the db gets opened, parse the rows and populate the dbprepare a pre-built sqlite file, ship it along with your app and load it …

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Feb 20

Rest interaction in Android

In last December ('13) I was asked to submit a talk proposal for the first Italian Droidcon, which I did. It got accepted, so in Febraury I gave my first public speech speaking of "(O)Authenticated Rest Interaction in Android" in front of real people. This post is meant to be a follow up with the information that can't be found in the slides I hoped to sum all the talk up in a post, but it got …

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2013

Jul 29

Contributing to Firefox for Android

In the past two / three years I have been (mostly) developing Android code, even before it was cool(tm), as a way to do something different from what I do during my day time job. I wrote some apps, a couple of libraries, and some 80% finished projects I really hope I will finish some day. Recently I thought that joining some big android related open source project could have been interesting, and …

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Mar 6

PostMan (RingsTwice) Reloaded - Android rest and oauth make easy(er)

Android and RestMy PostManLib android library had a quite troubled genesis. Some infos can be found in this old post , but bear in mind that I only kept the skeleton of what I wrote at that time (which, by the way, was inspired by this talk). The api was (to be kind) a bit clunky, and I recently chose to rewrite / finish it. Apart from its clunkyness, one thing was missing:

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2012

Nov 25

DroidAlone - reloaded

Whenever I speak with another android developer, the occasional chat goes to "what did you develop?" question. Last time it happened at droidcon uk, and for the first time I felt something wasn't completely right when I showed my DroidAlone app. DroidAlone is a useful app (so they say) that comes into play whenever you forget your phone at home. With a simple sms protected by a password choosen by …

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Nov 11

Android Content Providers Generator

During the refactoring of my two years old app DroidAlone, I decided to try to access to the storage through a ContentProvider. Even if the official documentation warns that there is no need to use content providers if your app does not want to export it's data against other apps, there are a bunch of advantages in using a content provider in your app. The main and more obvious advantage is that …

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Oct 29

DroidconUk 2012

Here I am, back again from my third DroidconUk experience. I can still remember explaining to my non tech friends what Android was the evening of the 1st droidcon, and since then it became a sort of ritual, a couple of days when I can take some rest from my day time job and take part to the community of some of the best android developers coming from all over the Europe.

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Sep 15

Gridlayout support library with maven

EDIT 17/10/2012: Gridlayout support is now working natively with maven android deployer. I strongly suggest to use it instead of my method. --------------------------- Gridlayout has been introduced since api level 14, and is being suggested layout as a more efficient alternative over nested linear layouts and relative layout. It has also been recently added as part of the android support …

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Jul 23

Intellij, Robolectric and Android

I have been curious about intellij since droicon uk 2011, where I noticed that some of the speakers were using IntelliJ instead of eclipse. A post from Richard Hyndman, who is a developer advocate from Google, was the final straw that pushed me to download IntelliJ and give it a try. The first thing an eclipse user will notice in intellij is how slick and fast compares to the behemoth which is …

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