This is not really a “pro” tip but its a tip nonetheless.
In stead of taking home my laptop from work I just carry a small portable drive. This drive has all my workspaces and projects and important files. The “problem” I face when debugging apps both at work and at home is that I have to uninstall them first since the debug.keystore differs on my work laptop and my home laptop.
Not a big thing just mildly annoying.
To solve this all you have to do is make sure you use the same keystore at home and at work.
1. In Eclipse go to Window/preferences/android/build. Here you will find where your default debug keystore is located.
2. Copy that keystore and put it on your portable drive
3. Paste the new location of the keystore on your drive to the field “Custom debug keystore:”
4. Make sure you update this field on both computers to point to the same keystore.
I thought I would just tout a friend of mine’s new 3D engine Rajawali. It’s work in progress at the moment and still has some features left to implement but as with anything Dennis works on it’s bound to be amazing. Another great thing is that it is open source so if you are a 3D wizard and feel like contributing send him an email ( contact details at his blog ).
Have you ever created an application that wasn’t intended for the mass market but for a private group of people such as an office or a company? When side stepping the public facing app markets ( Android Market or the Amazon Appstore ) you also miss out on the update functionality that comes with them.
PushLink, a private app market, solves that issue without costing you a penny. Your private app will get notified when there is an update available either through a notification or an in-app popup.
I have yet to try this myself but when I do get to work on a private app in the future PushLink is likely to be considered.
This is probably one of the nicest Google apps I have seen to date. The browsing experience is just super slick.
For now it seems Chrome is only available for ICS users. Haven’t seen any info saying it will be released for < 4.0.
Google recently released a tool that mirrors a portion of your monitor onto your device. If you want to quickly see what your design looks like on a phone ( without having to email your phone an image ) this is the tool for you. There tool is currently in beta so you might experience some issues. If you do experience bugs please report them to help improve the plugin.
The issue I have ( with many others I assume ) is when my device ( Galaxy Nexus ) have a higher resolution than my monitor. You will then get a black box at the top. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
View video here Download jar here Report bugs here
Did you lose your beloved Android phone while drunk? Or maybe someone stole it? Or maybe you just don’t know where it is. Don’t panic. There is help out there.
If you, like most people, set up a Google account when you initially set up your phone then all you have to do is go to the android market ( https://market.android.com/ ) and search for an app called Plan B. Thanks to the market ( and the fact that you initially choose to set up a Google account ) you can install that app remotely to your lost device.
This app will then email you with the location of your lost phone. And if that isn’t awesome then I do not know what is.
Before we can actually run our ICS applications on an actual device some might be tempted to run them on a virtual device. Since this post is written fairly soon after packages and adt for ICS was released not much has been written with regards to bugs or problems. I stumbled upon an annoying one where I can’t see action bar with the virtual back and home and recent apps buttons. To replicate…
in your AVD manager create a new device
give it a name
set target to api level 14
set skin to WXGA720
click create AVD
When you have successfully created your AVD click the [Start...] button followed by the [launch] button. Then you need to have some patience for a good couple of minutes before the AVD starts.
As you can see from the screen grab below (2) neither of the two screens have the action bar with the virtual buttons home, back, recent apps or menu.
To see what its supposed to look like compare with the screenshots from the google developer site (3)
As I said above not much has been written about the AVD for ICS yet and I am hoping this is resolved sooner rather than later. Or that someone points out what I am doing wrong
Will update when or if there is a resolution to this issue.
Screens ( 1. settings 2. result 3. expected result )
Joakim
UPDATE
The issue with the missing buttons are confirmed by google at this link. No info on when they will be added though.
“…Note that the emulator currently doesn’t support the new on-screen navigation bar for devices without hardware navigation buttons, so when using this skin, you must use keyboard keys Home for the Home button, ESC for the Back button, and F2 or Page-up for the Menu button…“
A year has passed without a single post. Funny that. Ambitions were high but then life sort of took over and this blog ended up on the back burner. Hopefully future posts won’t be years apart but that’s something I can’t promise so let’s just hope for the best ey?
At work I have now more or less completely transitioned into doing just Android work. I am not sure if Android is all I’ll be doing in the year to come but if that happens I wouldn’t complain. In fact I love my job more than ever. I just finished my first android app for AKQA and I will go into more detail of what and for whom it was as soon as we are live. Right now I have a weeks breather and then I will be moving on to another great project for another of our great clients. So excited.
During this weeks breather I will delve deep into all things Ice Cream Sandwich and hopefully do a few posts, comments and, if you are lucky, tutorials on the subject.
