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Android

The year was 1997. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were musing on love and the motions of amusement park rides, Pathfinder landed on Mars and Leonardo DiCaprio drew Kate Winslet as per one of his French associates.  It was around this time I had heard about a thing called “Java”, a fancy new language everyone was talking about. The word on IRC was that it was based on work Sun Microsystems had originally done for embedded software on set-top boxes and other smart appliances.
11 September, 2019 /

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ns

Native-what?

If you’re anything like myself before embarking on this project then you might wonder the same thing. Everyone has heard of React Native, it’s a popular technology enabling a cross-platform mobile development experience, but not so many have crossed paths with Nativescript, or {N}. Nativescript is a framework with a similar goal to React Native, providing the ability to publish native apps for both major platforms, iOS and Android, whilst only maintaining a single (mostly) JavaScript codebase.  It is available in three flavours: standard, Angular, and Vue.js, allowing developers with experience in the latter two frameworks to use their existing skills whilst building for mobile. Put simply, it’s a JavaScript runtime inside a native app, translating code on the fly into native elements.  In this post, I’m going to tell you about a few of the nice experiences we’ve had recently developing with Nativescript, as well as a few of the not so nice issues that were encountered, and whether we’d use it again.
06 July, 2018 /

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Shine is super proud to announce that senior consultant Ben Teese (@benteese) will be speaking at the YOW! Conference being held in Melbourne on the 3rd and 4th of December 2015. Ben will actually be co-presenting this one with Sam Ritchie (@FakeSamRitchie), an iOS developer from Perth. Sam will be talking about ReactiveCocoa,...

26 October, 2015 /

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yowconnected Last week I had the privilege of attending the YOW! Connected conference in Melbourne, Australia. YOW! Connected offers a look at all the interesting things that are happening in the mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) space, from the perspective of both software developers and UX designers. On the mobile front it included a variety of talks relating to both the iOS and Android platforms and yes, even a little bit of Windows. In general all the talks that I went to were pretty good,  but here I will write about a few that particularly interested me.
24 September, 2015 /

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Android's built-in testing framework is lacking on a number of levels. Enter Robotium, an open-source project. Robotium connects the dots by extending Android’s testing framework and providing convenience methods to help developers rapidly create tests. In this entry I will show how Robotium can be used for data input, finding and testing views and buttons, testing between multiple activities, and testing activities with extras. I'll also show how to work around issues with race-conditions in UI tests. I have created a GitHub project with a sample application and test project.
05 September, 2012 /

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The Android FamilySoftware fragmentation is a common concern for Android developers. Right now, supporting all versions down to Android 2.2 (Froyo) will make your application available to 93.5% of Google Play users. However, doing so also means you miss out on APIs that were released in the last 2 years. In this post I'll talk about this problem in detail, and highlight a few libraries available that help you develop an Android 2.2 application without limiting yourself to old APIs.
24 May, 2012 /

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Getting started with the development of location-based services on Android is relatively easy thanks to the well documented location API. However, getting more serious shows there is still much uncharted territory. One such area concerns the accuracy of real-life location data, which I have recently taken a close look at. In short, location data can be far more accurate than Google's conservative estimates - at least with the phone that I used.

14 October, 2011 /

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