Mark Lapasa

Treemaps are great to use if the key of the map already implements Comparable. For example, you can have a map with dates for keys. Insertion into the map will auto sort the newly inserted value by date, so when you need to extract what you need via .values(), it’s already in the ordered by date.

Source: StackOverflow

Android Engineering Team is making making huge strides in emulating the ARM stack on x86. I’ve been developing on API 10 x86 Atom image since it was released 2 weeks ago and it has dramatically changed my productivity. It’s great to see Honeycomb/ICS rendered in x86 OpenGL. It’s so cool to bring the Android emulator to first-class citizen for developing apps

The news can be found at http://android-developers.blogspot.ca/2012/04/faster-emulator-with-better-hardware.html

Rumor is that it is coming out this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s highly reliant on owning an Android phone for bluetooth integration of bi-directional video i/o and audio i/o.

I released Sunny Weekly Planner Basic Edition 2 months ago hoping that I would land a job. Once I got that job, I totally neglected to release the paid-for Deluxe Edition. I’ve spent the last 5 hours working on the last 5%. I just need to do a youtube video and upload it to the marketplace before the end of this weekend. TPT Community, thanks for your interest in this app.

• MotionEvent.getAction() & MotionEvent.ACTION_MASK will yield additional pointer specific data. MotionEvent.getAction() alone will yield the basic ACTION_DOWN, ACTION_UP, ACTION_MOVE, and ACTION_CANCEL events
• When an ACTION_DOWN has already occured, the next subsequent touch down before the previous touch goes up, will register as ACTION_POINTER_DOWN instead of ACTION_DOWN
• MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_DOWN & MotionEvent.ACTION_MASK will yield the index of the pointer that went down
• MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_UP & MotionEvent.ACTION_MASK will yield the index of the pointer that went down
• During a MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_UP or MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_DOWN, use this to derive the identity of the pointer for this event:
  final int pointerIndex = (mEvt.getAction & MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_INDEX_MASK) >> MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_INDEX_SHIFT;
  final int pointerId = ev.getPointerId(pointerIndex);

Source: Making Sense of Multitouch

When I used to lead a team, I would hold post-mortems at the end of Sprints to focus on what we did good and what we could do better. I figure I should do one on the latest app I have done which applies my latest knowledge on Native Android.

Things I Did Good:

• Core functionality was completed in 1 week
• Skinning the app took 1 week; learned how to create a number of reusuable scalable drawables like the < layer-list > to wrap < shape > ‘s with gradients and drop shadows
• I was fortunate to use the TEDxToronto android app as a template; it allowed me to built upon it to add other features like landscape support and backwards compatibility with v1.6+ devices, Google maps integration
• I am not a designer but I have an intermediate understanding of Photoshop to redesign the #devTO logo for the purposes of catching the eye in the Marketplace



• Implemented naming conventions on drawables and layouts to manage the complex collection of View artifacts
• Threading: Used a non-UI thread to download tweets, used a non-UI thread to queue and download profile pics. This adds to a more streamlined user experience rather than waiting for the app to come a screeching halt, waiting for all the data to be downloaded on the main UI thread, locking up the view
• This app implements ActionBar Sherlock which provides backwards compatibility of Android 3.0′s Honeycomb’s Action Bar to < v3.0 devices .
• This app implements the twitter and itinerary views as list fragments so that they may be reused in the same view in a tablet app. Fragments were originally available only for newer devices but backwards compatibility libraries like ActionBar Sherlock make new features like this available to older devices (1.6+)
• Out of the 3 apps I have done so far, I invested a lot of time to make this the prettiest and most accessible (1.6+). The stylus based app I did before was exclusive to one device (Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 3.1+). The vocal tweet app had minimal UI because it was an audio app

Things I Could Do Better:

• Even though I have a deployment checklist, there is at least a day between code complete to public ” final ‘final’ ” release. It’s like once it’s up there and you download it, there is the smallest thing which causes me to apply the fix, test it, export a release build and then upload it. The build is available to the public the same day but a couple of hours after deployment. Annoying and a time sink.
• I ran out of time to fit the tablet version in. It’s a matter of creating an optimized view for the same data. The same non-UI components can supply the data for the tablet version of the views
• I design the app to be extensible to create another instance of the app for another brand. However when I tested this, I ran into some errors that require some time to investigate.
• Even though the app is out there, people will not download it unless they know about it. Learning how to market an app is equally as challenging as developing it
• I wish I had enough time (or another resource) to make the content for the Itinerary section server-side driven

This is an app I have been working on for the past week that lets users know who is talking at an event, what are they talking about, when is the event happening, and what are other people saying about the event. The general layout and idea is based on the TEDxToronto app.

This app will work on any Android 1.6+ phone and down the road will have an optimized layout on Honeycomb 3.x tablets using the same code base. Actionbar Sherlock makes it possible to use fragments in older devices making it possible to do app development like this available to wide range of devices, making the fragmentation a non-issue.

The business case for this app is that it can be subclassed and skinned for conferences, monthly meetups, or any special event for that matter.