I planted a couple of milkweed flowers this year, and am thrilled to report that there are several caterpillars munching away on the leaves. Looking forward to seeing Monarch butterflies soon!

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Found on a bridge leading to the Sanderson Brook Waterfall.

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Since I use jetBrains products for both languages (IntelliJ or Android Studio for Kotlin, and AppCode for Swift), I’ve been able to take advantage of their Live Templates feature to automatically and seamlessly correct me if I type the wrong keyword. Here’s what the setup looks like… Important to note that the ‘Expand with’ setting defaults to Tab, but I need it to be Space.

Let me know in the comments if this helped, and if there are other cases you’ve run into!

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The class itself looked a little like this:

abstract class Block<State>() {
    ...
    protected lateinit var state: State
    ...
}

So it turns out, when you don’t apply any bounds to a generic parameter, it defaults to Any?. Therefore the compiler was really seeing this:

abstract class Block<State: Any?>() {
    ...
    protected lateinit var state: State
    ...
}

If you know the rules for lateinit, you’ll remember that it cannot be used with optional values, and so I was getting the error. The solution was to apply a non-optional bounds to the State parameter, like this:

abstract class Block<State: Any>() {
    ...
    protected lateinit var state: State
    ...
}

Everything worked great after this small change.

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Starting with Android 1.6, the Android Market’s emits a broadcast Intent named com.android.vending.INSTALL_REFERRER whenever certain parameters are added to the market url. Note that web version of the Market also passes these parameters to your devices upon install. Since the parameters need to follow the Google Analytics referral link format, Google provides a simple tool for generating these urls, or you could use a copy of my shared Google spreadsheet that I use to keep track of all my campaigns. Here’s a description for the important parameters:

So now you have a url with information that is broadcast by the Android Market when your app is installed. The next step is to capture that information inside your app and submit them to your mobile analytics provider (Google Analytics, Flurry, Localytics, etc). The way to do that is to first register a BroadcastReceiver in your AndroidManifest.xml. You’ll need to handle the com.android.vending.INSTALL_REFERRER broadcast like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
 ...>
    <application ...>
        <activity ... />

        <!-- Android Market install receiver -->
        <receiver
            android:exported="true"
            android:name="com.your.namespace.InstallReferrerReceiver" >
            <intent-filter >
                <action android:name="com.android.vending.INSTALL_REFERRER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </receiver>
    </application>
</manifest>

Next, we need the implement the class that handles the broadcast. All the class does is receives the INSTALL_REFERRER BroadcastIntent, takes the referrer extra from the intent and breaks it down into key/value pairs for submitting it to the analytics package. (AnalyticsTrackerFactory is just my generic wrapper for analytics; you can call your own directly instead).

public class InstallReferrerReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {
	private static final String TAG = "InstallReferrerReceiver";

	@Override
	public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
		HashMap<String, String> values = new HashMap<String, String>();
		try {
			if (intent.hasExtra("referrer")) {
				String referrers[] = intent.getStringExtra("referrer").split("&");
				for (String referrerValue : referrers) {
					String keyValue[] = referrerValue.split("=");
					values.put(URLDecoder.decode(keyValue[0]), URLDecoder.decode(keyValue[1]));
				}
			}
		} catch (Exception e) {
		}

		Log.d(TAG, "referrer: " + values);
		AnalyticsTrackerFactory.getTracker(context).event("Installed", values);
	}
}

So that’s all there is to it! Just take some vary basic steps and small changes to your app to easily track who’s referring downloads of your app.

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Have you ever run into the error “Incorrect AVA format” when trying to sign an Android APK with a new key? It turns out this useless error more than likely means that you have used some illegal character in the signing data. In my case, I had used a comma in the company name which isn’t allowed for some reason. Just remove any extra characters and you should be good to go!

EDIT: Great comment below from Adam M Dutko:

Put a \ before the commas and it will work. Here is an example: OU=Test Company\, LLC

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To help make our Android applications look even more professional, we can include HTML formatted text and display it in a WebView. Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to have local HTML, image and style files and display them. This is the same process I use to display help in Grandma Jong.

First, I’ve stored all my files in a subfolder of assets. This will make it easier to load the HTML, and via some built-in functionality in Android, it will load all assets from the same folder as well. Here’s a screenshot of the assets folder:

Here I have the HTML file, along with the referenced images. Now a glance into what the HTML looks like:

<p>
<img src="bomb.png" align="left" style="margin-right:1em;" /> Don't despair! Bomb tiles let you clear blocked tiles; just select the tile to remove, then select a bomb tile on the left. A matching tile will be removed from the level.
</p>

The <img> tag just has a straightforward reference to the image file, since when loading the HTML, the passed in path will be taken as the root path and all references are valid from there. Finally, there’s the WebView code needed to load the HTML from the assets folder. Once you have a reference to a WebView instance, all you need to do is call the loadUrl method on it:

webViewInstance.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/help/help.html");

The “file:///android_asset” path is a special one that points to the assets folder in your project. That’s all there is to it. Although I haven’t demonstrated it here, you can also store and load style and javascript files the same way.

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The Android Icon Design Guidelines have been updated to describe the latest design styles of iconography in versions 2.0+. The styles have changed dramatically from pre-2.0 days, so be sure to read the whole document.

There are also some nice Photoshop templates that can be download from here.

(via Roman Nurik)

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