Trying out the feature in PostBot which let’s you add an image to your post.

Thanks to @bakebrain on Twitter I’m writing this post on my HTC G1 via PostBot. Let’s see how it does.

I got the following post in my news reader from the Google Android Blog,

It’s no Cupcake, but T-Mobile G1 customers will receive newer firmware this week. Starting Thursday, February 5, T-Mobile will send subscribers an over-the-air update that adds:

Google Voice Search
The ability to save MMS messages/files
A feature that searches for system updates
Bug fixes and new features that address known issues

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Thanks to Christina’s article at Download Squad I now know that I can use the DDMS tool to capture screen shots directly from the phone.  I haven’t used the tool much because I usually just use the console and ./adb logcat to display logs.  Guess I should have dug a little deeper into what the tool can do, just shows that an old dog can learn new tricks!

Thought I’d through a question out the to all the Android Developers and ask: What syntax or parts of the development process do you always seem to forget or relearn?

I’ve got 3 that I always have to look up or when I try to debug what I’ve just done, it never seems to work the first (or second time).

1. The show() part of a Toast.

I get the,

Toast.makeText( this, “Some text”, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT )

but I just never remember the show() on the end.  Then I go and run the behavior and mull over it for 5 minutes before I finally remember.

2. Entering new Activities into the manifest file, at least this one gives you an error.

3. For whatever reason, I can never remember the Android reference syntax the first time.  Is it R.android.id or android.R.id…thanks to Eclipse code completion this isn’t to big of an issue.

So what always seems to stump you about the Android API or syntax??  Leave a comment or you can you this for fodder for your own blog.

(Updated 1/30/09 7:55am : corrected some grammar…syntax errors)

Well this post will show my ignorance towards floating point math.  So my new Android Application, which I hope to put up on the Market soon, is a shopping list which allows you to track how much you’ve spent as your are shopping.  This obviously deals with the price of the products you are purchasing so I expect the user to enter floating point values, but I convert to integers to make math functions go faster.

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Guess I’m on a book “review” kick lately.  I wasn’t planning on posting back to back about the two Android books I’ve bought, but I just received my bound copy of “Hello, Android” by Ed Burnette the other day.  Call me old school, but I still prefer a bound book to a pdf.  I’ve had a pre-release pdf copy for a couple of months now, and wrote about it in a previous post, but just haven’t been able to bring myself to get all my thoughts down on “paper” till I got the actual book.  So here’s my take…
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I am by no means a very good critique and haven’t written a book report since high school, but I have wanted to write my impression so far of the book “Professional Android Application Development” by Reto Meier.  First let me say I have great respect for anyone willing to author a book on software development.  Just writing development posts for this blog has been a huge learning curve for me, I don’t pretend to be the best technical writer!

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FIRST POST OF 2009!!

Threw this Android Activity together really quickly to see if I understood the different ways of getting a web page to launch.  The first three examples perform the same functionality, the Linkify.addLink call builds a means of launching an Intent.ACTION_VIEW.  The fourth example loads the url into a WebView in the layout.

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Thought I’d throw down a wish list for things to have Google development, show up in the Android Market or just development myself.

1. Touch-Screen keyboard (come on Cupcake!)

2. Better workflow for Music Player

3. Support for AVI video playback

4. Access for developers to the Widget API

5. Better RSS reader

6. Ability to edit Contact Groups from my G1

7. Port of Spore to Android!!

8. PDF and EBook reader

maybe more to come later…any other ideas?