Or how to keep your app connected and stop worrying.  Disclaimer: This is not another place where you can find java code snippet to open a socket and read and write to some server. If you need that, go back to your favorite search engine and look for another result. But be careful: while looking for "inspiration" I found a lot of examples where the connection was held inside the UI thread.

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Edit 2013-03-10: I've performed a substancial refactoring of postmanlib, and the details can be found in this new post With the development of MyDearSanta app, I needed to fetch and put some data to a rest service developed using django python framework with a simple set of json based rest apis. The development of the interaction between android and the rest web service was a bit messy because I …

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Pastimer, my barcode based kitchen timer is now on the market. The basic idea is to scan the barcode on the box to set the time. The url to download it from the market is https://market.android.com/details?id=com.whiterabbit.pastimer or this for the lite version https://market.android.com/details?id=com.whiterabbit.pastimer.lite The description of the product can be found here Android …

This time, while PastTimer has not been released yet, I started an experiment with an old friend. We wanted not just to release another standalone app, but interact in some way with a backend. The result is www.mydearsanta.info , a web based Christmas list, which comes together with and Android app https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smokingbytes.santas and an Iphone app …

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Pastimer is my 4th app. It's a simple (but nice) Android Kitchen Timer based on barcode scanning. I learned some things during my journey of android development, but this time I wanted to focus on user interface and ease of use. As always, it starts as a simple idea, the you start putting some code in it, it's "almost" working, and the difference between almost working and finished, is something …

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Apart from some rest, and reading some good books (like excellent Kent Beck's Test Driven development by example, and "growing object-oriented software guided by tests"), I have been working on a new app in the last month or so. A week end locked at home because my gf was ill, was a good excuse to start a deep programming session. The app I am about to release (well, to be honest it still lacks …

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This time I want to share something I learned about working in background on android. One of the biggest advantages of android over ios (or, at least, some ios version ago) is that your app is not sandboxed and can continue to live in background. To perform background (not visible) work, all you need to know is how to use android services. A service is a piece of an application that is allowed to …

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It's already been 18 days, and it's time to make some considerations. For those who don't know what pegdroid is, it's a simple peg solitaire for android. I released it 18 days ago, it's free and it's basically ad-supported (but I don't get much from that). I integrated google analytics in my app, so I can get some help from the statistics I get every day. In the meanwhile, the market dashboard got …

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I just released a new game. It's (yet another) version of the popular solitaire game. I thought its name was "Chinese checkers", but it looks like it's most common name is "Peg". Anyway, it didn't take (too) much to develop it, I really enjoyed learning something about the powerful andengine framework, but I am still proceeding at a slow pace since I can work on android only after my daytime job.

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Another thing I always wanted to do was game programming. Moving objects and interacting with the game, as well as having fun with them, gives great satisfaction. I think the fun part is that you have immediate feedback of what is happening, it's just not like filling an edit text and pressing a button (or server side programming). Given that I am spending much of my spare time in (trying to) …

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