Motherboard Change

Posted on November 27th, 2010 by Ian G. Clifton

On Thanksgiving I decided to change out the most painful of hardware components to replace: the motherboard. I had previously built my computer with a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard, which came recommended by Tom’s Hardware, among other sources. It was a relatively low-end motherboard with a LGA 1366 socket, and it was great… for a while. After a few months, the onboard NIC died. That wasn’t too big of a deal for me, but then I started to have other issues. The computer would occasionally lock up without obvious cause. I noticed that the RAM was being overclocked (well, CAS settings) and underpowered by the motherboard’s auto settings, so I manually set those. That didn’t solve the problem though. I eventually gave in and decided to update the BIOS, hoping for some good luck. Continue reading →

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Animating Android Activities

Posted on October 17th, 2010 by Ian G. Clifton

A relatively common task is to have some kind of animation between Activities in Android. The default animation isn’t necessarily always the same across devices, and sometimes it is desirable to customize this. A quick look at the docs will lead you to the overridePendingAnimation method of Activity. Perfect! You just activate this method immediately after calling finish() or startActivity() and it works exactly how you would expect… well, unless the device isn’t running at least Android 2.0. It’s very easy to miss the “Since API Level 5″ note in the documentation (you should definitely take advantage of the “filter by API level” feature in the top right of the Android developer site) and adding this method to your code and trying to run it on a previous version of Android will result in a force-closed Activity. Continue reading →

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Using Meta-Data In An AndroidManifest

Posted on October 8th, 2010 by Ian G. Clifton

Sometimes you have the need to set up some app-wide configuration information in an Android app or need to create a class that can be used in multiple projects with a generic way of setting configuration values. This is particularly useful for things like API keys that will probably be different across apps but should be accessible in the same way. There are several ways to do it, but the one I’ve come to prefer is adding a meta-data node to the AndroidManifest.xml file. Continue reading →

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Creating An Android Main Menu Link

Posted on September 26th, 2010 by Ian G. Clifton

It’s becoming a more and more common practice for Android apps to have a “main menu” or home Activity of some sort. The Facebook and Twitter apps both use a series of icons on a dashboard of sorts. Other apps, such as Survivor, use a list menu. All of these allow the user to quickly jump back to a list of a common tasks/sections within an app while avoiding wasting screen space and keeping the menu button free to create menus that are specific to the current activity (as they should be). But, how do you implement this? Continue reading →

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Survivor For Android

Posted on September 25th, 2010 by Ian G. Clifton

I’ve been rather busy, so I’m a bit late in posting this, but Survivor for Android was released about a week-and-a-half ago. This app is basically a companion to the TV show, allowing you to easily view bios, play the Survivor Fantasy game, vote for Player of the Week, and even watch full episodes. In fact, I’m rather impressed with the quality of the full episodes, so check the app out. It’s free (sponsored by Sprint).

I was one of two developers for this app. The other developer set up a lot of the screens and did most of the API integration. I improved the UI throughout, set up the API base, built the bio sections, and created all of the video code. The app turned out very well, but it has a lot of screens, so it was definitely a great deal of work. Previously, we had created the Survivor app for WebOS (though my only part in that was setting up the video code), but I think this turned out much better than the WebOS version that was used the past two seasons. Continue reading →

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