Mobile software development for Android devices. The articles in this category explore different languages, tech stacks, and frameworks for mobile.
I love dependency injection frameworks ever since I started using them. Specifically, I'm obsessed with using Autofac and I have a hard time developing applications unless I can use a solid DI framework like Autofac! I've recently been working with Xamarin and found that I wanted to use dependency injection, but some of the framework doesn't support this well out of the box. I' was adamant to get something going though, so I wanted to show you my way to make this work. Disclaimer: In its current state, this is certainly a bit of a hack. I'll explain why I've taken this approach though! In your Android projects for Xamarin, any class that inherits from Activity is responsible for being created by the framework. This means where we'd usually have the luxury of passing in dependencies via a constructor and…
Background on Timur's Kernel I got fed up with having a pretty crummy head unit in my 2012 Audi TT RS (named Ignantt), and decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands. Part of doing a Nexus 7 head unit install in a vehicle involves powering the tablet up with a USB on-the-go (OTG) cable and being able to not only power the device but also plug in USB devices into the tablet to use. In order to get this working, everyone seems to be relying on this kernel from Timur. As per Timur's site: This feature allows you to connect one or more USB slave devices to your tablet and charge it at the same time. This allows you, say, to operate an external USB DAC without the tablet ever running out of power. To…
Trying To Keep It Alllll Together... I'm a big fan of TODO lists. I find that they're a great way for me to set up a bunch of tasks and feel really productive as I work through them. I'll make TODO lists for almost anything. What do I need to get done tomorrow morning at work? What groceries do I need to get? What topics am I thinking of blogging about? I'll get some sort of TODO list going for anything. The one thing that I need in my TODO list to stay effective is to constantly have it around me to remind me. I was running the Evernote app on my Android phone and recently made the observation that things that I put in there had a much higher likelihood of getting done versus things I put in my…
Articles It’s official: Video games make your brain bigger: I don't have much time for video games anymore, but this is still totally awesome news. It's in. It's official. Video games can actually make you smarter. How great is that? If you're like me and you find you don't have much time for games any more, it might be worth picking up a hobby game. It's a great way to relax provided you don't get too addicted to it and apparently it can make you smarter. Perfect combo! The myth of the brainstorming session: The best ideas don’t always come from meetings: I thought this article was pretty interesting because we do a lot of brain storming at our office. Sometimes I like to think the sessions go smoothly or that they're productive. When I contrast them with particular cases…
Fragments: A Little Background Update: The actual application is available on the Google Play store. Once upon a time, Android developers used only two things called activities and views in order to create their user interfaces. If you're like me and you come from a desktop programming environment, an Activity is sort of like a form or a window. Except it's more like a controller for one of these classes. With that analogy in place, a view is then similar to a control. It's the visual part you're interacting with as a user. I remember the learning curve being pretty steep for me being so stuck in my desktop (C# and WPF) development, but once I came up with these analogies on my own, it seemed pretty obvious. So to make an Android application, one would simply put some views together…
