simpligility technologies inc. – simplifying your life with agility
With the release of the Android platform 2.3 aka Gingerbread a while ago us developers got a great tools into our hands: StrictMode. Unfortunately if you application still needs to be run on on older versions of Android you are a bit out of luck. Until now at least because I will show you how to use StrictMode in development even if your app e.g. supports Android 1.6 and up.
Continue reading ‘Android StrictMode for all platform versions’
So with the introduction with the Android License Validation Library and now with the SDK tools revision 8 and the integrated options, Proguard has gained more and more interest in the Android developer community and users of the Maven Android Plugin are certainly not left behind. Of course Proguard is a fairly powerful tool that overs plenty of opportunity to get yourself into trouble or long debugging sessions. With this post I am going to show you how to best set up proguard usage in your Maven based Android application build. So lets get started.
Continue reading ‘Proguard for Android with Maven without shooting yourself in the foot’
After presenting about Apache Maven usage for Android development at the Vancouver Android Developer group and the Barcelona GTUG as well as the first Canadian Android Developer conference AndroidTO, I am taking another step forward. Coming March 2011 I will be presenting about using the Maven Android Plugin and associated tools from setup to publishing your application on the market as well as running continuous integration servers and working with instrumentation tests and related toolkits probably showcasing Robotium as well as RoboElectric.
It would be great if you could join me there as well as let me know if there is any specific topics in this context that you would like to see discussed.
I am also contemplating organizing some sort of Maven Android Plugin or even a more generic build tool related BOF or so. Would you be interested in something like that? If so let me know here or on the Maven Android Developers mailing list.
I look forward to meet you in San Francisco.
Manfred
I love how life keeps throwing opportunities and challenges at me and experiencing the personal growth I gain from taking them onboard and running with it. Recent things that I remember fondly are big changes like starting my own company, completing home improvement projects and of course every day again and again being a dad of three little, but fast growing rascally boys. Smaller things are reading and thoroughly enjoying books like ReWork. And then there are events like yesterdays AndroidTO developer conference for Android. It was the first such conference in Canada and in my opinion a huge success. I was invited to present by Puleen Patel and took up the opportunity and made my way all the way from Victoria.
Continue reading ‘Growth’
If you are developing Android applications that need to interface with SOAP web services, you probably know that the Android SDK does not have any support for this technology. It is somewhat considered legacy, but it is still widely used in many enterprise applications. When you look around for a SOAP library that is suitable for mobile devices in the sense that it is not too heavy you will inevitable find ksoap, which has a history on J2ME and Blackberry. Unfortunately the project has been pretty much dead for a long time now.
Continue reading ‘Reviving ksoap2 for Android’
After doing successful presentations about using Apache Maven for building and managing your Android applications and related dependencies in Vancouver and Barcelona, I am have been invited to do a workshop at the Android developer event AndroidTO at the end of October in Toronto. More and more good patches and features are making into the Maven Android Plugin and there story for users just keeps getting better and better. I look forward to see all the other presentations, meet with other developers and share my stories.
Update: The presentation in front of close to 200 people went well and there was a lot of interest into continuous integration builds, using libraries and testing. For your please you can get the presentation file with the links to code samples and so on. Enjoy!
Just a quick heads up that I will be presenting about Apache Maven usage for Android development in an updated version from my Vancouver presentation at the Google Technology User Group in Barcelona, Spain on the 10th of September. I look forward to the event and will let you know here how things went 
Later..
I just came back from the presentation and uploaded the presentation file now (Maven Android Introduction GTUG Barcelona). The rest of the resources is available as part of the Maven Android Plugin Samples and the Roboguice project. The meeting itself was fun. There were over 30 other geeks in attendance and the presentation was regularly interrupted with laughter and questions, so I assume it was well received. I hope everyone learned a bit and will give Maven and Android a spin and send us some feedback.
As you all know the main supported persistence mechanism on Android is storing data in the extremely widespread embedded database SQLite. Now when you look around various books and documentation, the examples you get are most of the time are pretty trivial. When you then come from a background of full on relational database management systems like PostgreSQL, working with SQLite with have a few surprises to you. One of those surprises is that referential integrity is not a standard feature unless you have some tricks up your sleave.. Continue reading ‘Referential integrity with sqlite on Android the lazy way’
So you got your Android application building with Maven and the instrumentation tests running on the continuous integration server give you an all green. Features are good on your application and you think it is time to get it on to the Android market and among users to get some feedback. What now? I will show you how you can get your Android package ready for upload…
Continue reading ‘Sign, zipalign and to market, to market with Maven’
With the latest release of the Maven Android Plugin a bunch of changes I did went out to the rest of the users of the plugin. As of version 2.5.0 the plugin has improved verification of the sdk platform and api level, a new zipalign goal and maybe the emulator start works on windows too. And the samples have been expanded and changed to use the Android jar artifacts from Maven central. But lets look at the changes of the plugin in detail today and maybe the samples another day…
Continue reading ‘Maven Android Plugin with zipalign and improved verification’
