Gyuri Grell - sharing my wisdom with the world

Google Wave invites NO LONGER available

Gyuri — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:32:25 +0000

I have 5 Google Wave invites available. First 5 comments below will receive the invites. Remember to include your email address!

[EDIT: All gone. I'll post again if I get any more.]

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Next version of Android SDK (1.6/Cupcake) ready for developers

Gyuri — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:39:06 +0000

Version 1.6 of the Android SDK has been released to developers. Though this isn't a major release, there are quite a few tasty updates that I'm looking forward to (both as a user and a developer).

For users, updates include:

Quick search box - The Android search mechanism has been redesigned to be able to search across multiple data sources including bookmarks, history, contacts, web, etc. It also is smart enough to bubble up the more commonly used results.
The camera, camcorder and gallery have been simplified and made quite a bit faster than before.
VPN support has been added.
- L2TP/IPSEC pre-shared key based VPN
- L2TP/IPsec certificate based VPN
- L2TP only VPN
- PPTP only VPN
A bettery usage indicator which shows you how much each of your running apps is consuming so that you can stop those that kill your battery.
Better accessibility support.
A much improved Android Market that addresses many of the concerns that users and developers had with the market. These changes also help discoverability and doesn't hide paid apps.

For developers:

An API to handle the expanded search framework used by then quick search box.
A new multi-lingual text to speech engine called Pico. It allows any Android application to "speak" a string of text with an accent that matches the language, and supports English (American & British), French, Italian, German and Spanish.
A new gestures API for creating and reusing gestures, and associating it with actions.
Extended support for varying screen resolutions and densities. This will become more important as WVGA and QVGA devices come to market.
Telephony support for CDMA
A newer version of OpenCore media engine with additional codec support and improved buffering.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Android WVGA support

Gyuri — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:00:00 +0000

I came across this interesting discussion yesterday regarding WVGA supporting coming in the Donut (1.6) version of Android OS. It looks like there will be a lot of work cut out for developers because we'll need to support Cupcake (1.5) which is standardized on HVGA, and Donut which will now start supporting not only various resolutions, but also various screen densities. As developers, we'll need to consider our layouts on various screens to make sure the look their best. Thankfully, there will be some built-in support for scaling layouts and images to ease the transition.

There is a blog post being written on the topic of different screen sizes, and we have gone through round after round of work on the underlying model of the platform and how to best explain the way this works, which is
reflected in the doc.

As a side note, Al Sutton of AndAppStore.com has prepared a build of the 1.6 SDK and eclipse plugin to help test out the features coming in the next revision. We'll need all the head start we can get to implement these new features. I've played around with this a bit, and like some of the new features coming to the eclipse plugin. I'll write more about these later.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Distribution of apps in the Android Market

Gyuri — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:50:21 +0000

AndroidLib.com is a third-party website (not run by Google) that presents a nice display of all the apps available in the Android Market. They have been crunching some statistics about what kinds of apps are available and the number of downloads they have. One interesting bit of information is that at least 25% of the apps have less than 50 downloads! Goes to show that it isn't enough to just upload your app to a mobile market and expect millions of downloads; you really need to get the word out about what you're doing, what your apps are and why people should download yours.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Raw Ice Kream Sandwich

Gyuri — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:09:43 +0000

Raw Ice Kream Sandwich, originally uploaded by ggrell.

I made this for Agnes' birthday. Yum!

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

An introduction to the Android platform

Gyuri — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:45:00 +0000

Here are the slides for my introductory presentation on the Android platform and some useful links to Android related sites.

Books

I highly recommend a CommonsWare subscription for three books (The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development, The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development, and Android Programming Tutorials) from Mark Murphy. It is only $35/year. You can't beat that!

Sample Code & Graphics

apps-for-android is a set of 10 simple projects from the Android team.
shelves is a larger application from a Google developer with examples of custom lists and animations.
astrid is a full-featured todo list application that has been published to the Android market.
Android GUI PSD is a Photoshop file for mocking up Android GUIs.
Android Snippets - code snippets for common actions
Web view of Android framework source

Tutorials

Forums

Blogs

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Adventures in mobile development

Gyuri — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:00:00 +0000

It's about time I started writing again, so I'll fill you in what I've been working on in my spare time over the last couple of months. Back in the day when I started iconoclast software, I developed several games for a touchscreen platform that was at the time found in airports, bars, etc. Ever since those were published, I've been dreaming of porting them to a mobile platform. At first I started out porting to .NET so I could get it on Windows Mobile PDAs at the time. Today, PDAs are pretty much gone, replaced by far better smart phones, and I've had to redirect my vision a bit. While working for IBM, I was unable to do any work in my spare time (due to contractual reasons), but now I'm free to do as I please. I feel like I missed the boat on the big rush to the iPhone platform once they allowed native apps, yet it still remains a more than viable platform. For now though, I've got my eyes on the Android platform, they new upstart that will most likely grow to be even bigger than the iPhone. I also chose to start with Android for a couple reasons:

It uses Java which is very close to C# which is what I use in my day to day development.
It is really starting to grow and explode now (with at least 18 handsets expected by the end of the year), so I'm trying to get in on the ground floor.
Can do development on any platform I choose (Windows, Linux, Mac). I don't currently own a Mac, so I don't need to spend the money on it initially.

For the past month I've been reading up on Android from a bunch of blogs, and the ever helpful set of books from CommonsWare author Mark Murphy (the best $35 I've spent on a set of books). More recently, Motorola has made a huge bet on Android at is putting out a lot of resources for developers with their MOTODEV program. It is really great to see a company get behind a great product like Android and put out something of true value to the community. Starting in August, I really got into porting the first game and have been working hard on that ever since. I'm trying to have it ready in time to submit it to the Android Developer Challenge 2 by the end of the month. It'll be close, but hopefully I can pull it off. I'll be posting more about it on my business site, trickybits.com. trickybits as a company will focus on producing high quality applications for mobile platforms, starting with Android initially. From what I've heard, Android is sorely lacking high quality apps, and I definitely intend to help fill that gap.

I'm also working on an introductory presentation on Android, supposedly the first in the area. We'll be putting it on during our next iPhone/Android Developers meetup next Wednesday, Aug. 19th at 6pm. I'm really excited about doing this, as I haven't done a presentation like this in a long time. It should be a good introduction with everything one needs to start writing a simple application. I'll be posting slides and related links on Wednesday.

That's all for now, I'll be posting more interesting tidbits about what I learn about the platform. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Resolving conflict between Google Desktop and Launchy

Gyuri — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:37:35 +0000

I use Launchy, a great program launcher for Windows and Linux, that indexes your Start menu, icons on the desktop and lets you quickly and easily launch them. It's also smart about letting you type the least amount, and learns as you repeat the same shortcut over and over. I mapped the shortcut key to Windows+Space which is the most convenient for me.

Recently I also installed Google Desktop to be able to search my computer and Outlook quickly and easily. It turns out that GD also maps the Windows+Space key which I never use -- I got used to Ctrl+Ctrl for the GD quick search window.

Although not as convenient as using the UI to change it, GD does allow some minor tweaking of the keyboard shortcuts via registry settings on Windows. I found the answer here, but I'll summarize:

Exit Google Desktop by clicking the Desktop icon in your system tray and selecting Exit.
Open your registry editor.
In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\Preferences, create a DWORD value named hot_key_flags.

Double-click the value you've just created and enter the number that corresponds with your preference. Alternatively, you can entirely delete the hot_key_flags entry to enable all Desktop shortcuts.

Value	Meaning
0	Disable all Desktop shortcuts
1	Enable only Ctrl-Alt-G
2	Enable only Windows-G
3	Enable only Ctrl-Alt-G and Windows-G shortcuts
4	Enable only Windows-Space
5	Enable only Windows-Space and Ctrl-Alt-G
6	Enable only Windows-Space and Windows-G
7	Enable all Desktop shortcuts

Close the registry editor.
Restart Google Desktop to apply the new settings.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

Convertbot: Beautiful conversion app on iPhone

Gyuri — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:49:04 +0000

[via Noah Stokes]

You are not watching this post, click to start watching

DrupalCon DC 2009

Gyuri — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:15:22 +0000

It was my first time attending DrupalCon, and what a difference from your typical corporate fare. The positive energy is quite palbable, I'm guessing since many are giving away their time and knowledge to advance this great platform, Drupal. Attendees were quite friendly, and I met several people, including some lunchmates through Twitter.

Here are my notes from the various presentations I attended:

DAY 1

The themer's tookit - Emma Hodgbin
Though a little cranky without her morning coffee :-), Emma gave a good presentation about theming and the tools she uses. Her tools: Firebug, BrowserShots, Browsercam, Devel module, Design library (zotero), grids (blueprint, 960, yahoo), dvcs (git, mercurial, bazaar). She also encouraged everyone to blog our toolkit, so other's can see the possibilities. I also look forward to taking a look at her book, "Front End Drupal". At the end, during Q&A someone mentioned that Komodo is a fine editor for PHP and themeing.

Theme Layer Limitations - Young Hahn
My only takeaway from this presentation was the fQuery module, which is a jQuery-like module for help with using the Forms API.

Organic Groups: What It Can Do and Where It's Headed - Moshe Weitzman
I was interested in this presentation because OG is what I'll need to use when I set up areas on my business site for the various Android applications I plan on releasing this year. Moshe showed screenshots of Development Seeds gorgeous intranet called 8 Trees. They developed a module called Spaces which seems to help in configuring the look and feel of a group in a reusable form. More examples of OG included novell.com/communities and symantec.com/connect/groups. Some useful modules that tie into OG include og_vocab (taxonomy specific to a group), og_panels (helps config the look and feel of group), and og_facets (faceted search results).

Beyond the Web: Drupal Meets the Desktop - Justin
This presentation was about using external applications to add to and take out of a Drupal site. This will be useful for me because I'd like to gather some statistics in my Android applications about its use, and the post it up to the website for my own personal analysis. The BlogAPI is available for adding nodes, while the FileAPI for adding files. A more robust implementation of file uploading comes from the FileFramework module, which provides remote addition of files as nodes, and supports file conversion, metadata extraction, ahah preview and can store files on CDNs. The DAV and WebDAV modules implement the distributed authoring and versioning web api which is widely used.

For getting data out there are the feeds provided by the Views module, to which you can add the Tokenauth module to do token based authentication. There's also the Atom module for providing Atom feeds. Email is another possibility with the built-in drupal_mail() method. The SMTP module provides a more robust and centralized method for sending email.
Finally, he talked about some more advanced interoperability methods. xmlrpc is provided via hook_xmlrpc() for exposing methods & params. The Services module looks like something I'll be able to use, since it provide pluggable server backends (SOAP, REST, JSON), pluggable data libs and an introspection tool. Services allows you to get file info, menu trees, get/save/delete nodes, search nodes/users, send email, get taxonomy and login/logout users.

Slides and video will be made available on his website.

Business Analytics in Drupal with Views - Frank Febbraro and Irakli Nadareishvili
Irakli demonstrated his cool ViewsCharts module, which is a brand new charting module for charts in views. It uses use OpenFlashCharts, with AmCharts and Google Charts coming soon. I can definately make use of these when storing stats in Drupal.

DAY 2

Practical Semantic Web - Boris Mann
I haven't followed up much on what use the semantic web has, so this was an eye opener for me. I'm glad that there's an effort to get this implemented in drupal so we get most of the default capabilities for free. Useful modules include RDF, RDF CCK, RDF evoc, SPARQL, MOAT, exhibit, and views_exhibit.

Developing Facebook apps with Drupal - Dave Cohen
This gave me good insight into how Facebook apps are built, and how easy it can be do set up your site to work inside of facebook. This got me thinking about how I could possibly merge social aspects of an Android application into a website, then also pull it into facebook as well. Some really great possibilities here.
The Drupal for Facebook module provides all the capabilities needed to tie to Facebook - posting to news feeds, publishing profile boxes, FQL queries, canvas pages via FBML or IFRAME, and Facebook Connect authentication. For more information, go to drupalforfacebook.org and dave-cohen.com.

DAY 3

CCK Mashup -- Oh The Things You Can Do! - Karen S.
One cool module I learned about is Demonstration which allows you to create a snapshot of your site before demo, and you can restore after. Too bad the presenter didn't create her website on her local laptop, because connectivity issues kept her from properly doing the whole presentation.

Some notes:
computed field - can grab & store from a value related node
node reference - establish relationships between data

alex barth - Feed API
pulls an external xml feed into nodes
{csv parser} - uses feed api to pull in csv data
{kml parser}
{simplepie parser} - xml and other formats

Business of Open Source - Liza Kindred
I was surprised by the number of virtual teams in the room (Virtual teams being those that are highly decentralized, with most communications via phone/internet). Good quote from the presentation:

"I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. Somehow it balances out in the end." - Katy Seredy

Selling You & Your Drupal Services - Neil Giarratana
This was one of my favorites of the conference. Neil was very comfortable up by the podium, and presented a highly informative, flowing and interesting presentation. I won't even post my notes here -- go watch the video instead, you won't be disappointed.

You are not watching this post, click to start watching