I finally figured out how to use GitHub.  It didn’t work well at all with IntelliJ, mostly because the learning curve is pretty vertical regarding to setting up permissions and connecting github with your machine (pgp keys, etc).

You can read about my first github project here and all the trouble I had getting camera images from the camera functionality on your Android phone into my Android app.

My app is functionally complete.  I need to do more testing and I have a bug related to importing a photo taking by the device’s camera that I can’t reproduce but the graphic designer reproduces on his HTC Evo.  I need to get a logcat from him to try and troubleshoot where the problem might be.  I’ve sent out feelers to some of my other contacts on Android to see if they can reproduce the problem.

I need to get the final artwork from the designer as well as design an about screen as well.  There are a number of ideas I have related to improving the app but I want to see how it does on the market before adding many more features.  Probably one of the nice things about releasing a free app, if no one uses it I feel less compelled to update and improve it.

I like what it does though and I can see myself using it regularly so at any rate it does what I set out to have it do.

I spent some time looking at GreenDroid . I like the idea of a unified library to help aid in developing apps but I couldn’t get it to work very well, not in IntelliJ and not outside of his sample application.  Either way there wasn’t going to be easy way to integrate it into all the work I had done already.  I really liked his QuickActions work which is what lead me to GreenDroid but in the end I had to abandon using it.

I stumbled on some work that Lorenz did around QuickActions and the code was free to use, easy to understand and easy to modify which was pretty exciting.  He had a bunch of samples that were easy to build and play with which was always nice.

I started looking into new projects but find myself intimidated by all the dp dpi px and other screen resolution type issues that people regularly complain about.  It’s probably just a matter of doing some reading and experimenting.

My project is coming along nicely.  I learned the hard way that the Android emulator is quite different than an actual device so when I got my phone back running my project on it pointed out a number of issues that I hadn’t thought of because they weren’t exposed with the emulator.

Here are some issues I tackled with recently:

• If you have multiple <intent-filter sections in yourAndroidManifest.xml defining:

<action android:name=”android.intent.action.MAIN” />

<category android:name=”android.intent.category.LAUNCHER” />

then each of those sections will create icons for your application with no other identification saying which is which.. Can be a bit confusing on which icon to press to run what main mechanism

• If you are launching an custom intent/activity from preferences DO NOT specify data= in your preferences.xml unless you are set to handle it, otherwise you will get a “cannot find activity” exception.  This took me several hours to discover, a lot of head scratching and swearing because I got lazy and never deleted the data= part that I copied from Google’s example code.
• The bundle as the argument to onCreate() for your activity is actually very useful and tied to onSaveInstanceState(), this I supposed is common sense but no example I read actually showed them being used together so some digging exposed to me how to use it, very handy.
• PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences() is super easy to use, beats property file loading/saving which I use at work a lot.
• My app is targeting Android 2.1 so I couldn’t use Camera.getNumberOfCameras().  I was using Camera.open() to find out if the device has a camera but not calling Camera.release() which caused some really strange exceptions later on in my code
• this information on screens proved very important to several UI problems I was having (multi-touch), should be fundamental reading for anyone learning Android programming.

Well after much complaining, petitions, calls I finally got a replacement phone.  Bell called me and offered to replace the phone with a brand new one.

Sadly I had to wait until now to get it.  The Christmas holidays and slow mail service during the holidays had me wait a couple of weeks but at least I have a new phone.  I have to send back the old repaired phone when they finally get around to fixing it so I have some time to see how this new phone fares.  To be honest I’m not sure I expect it will last any longer.  The new phone they sent has nearly the exact same manufacturing date and considering my luck with XBOXes the manufacturing dates usually mean that I’ll get another dud,  but at least I’m up and running again.  When I do get my old repaired phone I’ll have two choices from which to choose and will hopefully have enough information to make an informed choice which is better (ie: does the old phone have new hardware in it or did they just flash the SD card for the least reliable fix out there).

For Christmas I bought a Canon T2i DSLR camera, it’s good but the learning curve is nearly vertical, especially for someone like me who came from a point and shoot.  It takes great pictures though and learning something new is always fun.  Youtube has a lot of great tutorial videos as well.

I bought a cheap Samsung plasma TV and Sherwood audio receiver for my other place hooked up the TV to my WDTV to watch a UFC fight (to make sure the TV was working without any dead pixels before I move it) and read the manual for the receiver which should do what I’m expecting for a simple multi-room stereo.

I’m still working on my first Android app.  I’m having some real trouble finding someone to draw icons for me.  I’m terrible at icon type art so if I can’t find anyone to draw for me then I’ll be stuck using some of the free icons, which is pretty disappointing.