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Bob 12 – New Hat
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Resources For Android Development
Just a short post today, outlining some cool stuff I’ve found for Android development.
IntelliJ IDEA
Google have very kindly put together the ADT for Eclipse, which consists of plugins and layout managers to make development a bit smoother. Which would be great for me, if using Eclipse didn’t make me want to pull my nails out with forceps (I’m a Visual Studio person by day). I dislike Eclipse so much, that I spent most of the last project building in TextMate and looking up API references by hand. The very nice people who make my most favourite Visual Studio plugin in the whole WORLD – Resharper, also make a very nice Java IDE called IntelliJ IDEA. Version 8 came with some basic plugins you could download for Android development, but the very nice people at Jetbrains have put some serious time into the Android tools for Version 9 of IntelliJ. Inbuilt Logcat support, and a run/deploy model which beats the socks off the Eclipse one. I believe there’s debugging support as well – I’ve not been able to test that yet though. All in all, a very nice environment. Oh, and most of the refactoring & code navigation tools that make Resharper so awesome in the first place. Check out version 9 BETA.
DroidDraw Beta
DroidDraw is a cross-browser UI designer and editor for Android applications. I’ve not had a proper play around with it yet, I’ve just been using it for a few days, but so far it is officially awesome. Much more reliable than the in built Eclipse editor, and nowhere near as frustrating. I’ll be honest, now I’ve got the very, very good XML support which IntelliJ provides, I’m not needing it so much, but it makes a great prototyping tool.
Linky Linky Linky
Some articles which have been useful over the past few days:
How to use AlertDialog.Builder in Android applications Great quick reference to AlertDialog.Builder.
What’s Your Preference: Part One Writing preferences should be easy. _Don’t do my trick and write a load of custom layouts, only to realise the API does 90% of the work for you
What’s Your Preference: Part Two more of the above
Android 1.5 android.R.drawable Icon Resources The API contains a load of built in graphics you can just reference.
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Barcamp Manchester
Can I sleep yet?
Barcamp Manchester 2 happened this weekend (twitter: #bcman2). As you can guess by the title, this was the second barcamp run in Manchester, and at 200 people, was one of the biggest community event held in the area for a while. We had a great range of people turning up, from Londoners bringing N900s, through to locals playing with giant robots. What happens when you take that amount of people, a near limitless supply of tea, coffee, soft drinks and sweet things and put them in an awesome space? Sessions happen, discussions are had and people come up with ideastm.
Venue
Barcamp this year was run in the Contact theatre (twitter: @contactmcr), which is not just a phenomenal space (several stages/cinemas, rooms and excellent communal bar spaces), but comes with THE BEST STAFF I HAVE EVER KNOWN AT A BARCAMP. Seriously, considering they were there for two days solid, they came into sessions, ran session, did some beatboxing and honestly added to the atmosphere. They really wanted to get engaged, and even came up on stage to do some powerpoint karaoke. You guys rock – we’re definitely working with you again!
Talks
I admit it, I didn’t get to many talks this time around. We got a little wrapped up in making stuff happen, then sleeping, then taking a much needed walk. I did make a talk on Monotouch, the port of the Mono project the the iPhone. Looked cool, especially as a .NET developer by trade.
For those that are visiting my blog from my android demo talk, you’ll find the resources on the talk and the code on this blog post. If you have any questions, catch me on the usual channels: twitter and e-mail.
Food
Pizza. Cheese And Ham Coissants. Sushi. Ice Cream. Nuff said.
Evening
Paul Sylvester – Magic’s Best Kept Secret rocked the floor yet again. This time he was performing close up magic, working with small groups at a time. The perfect combination of magic, pizza and some light drinks was spot on, and the magic kept going all evening. People splintered out for some Beatles Rock Band (note: next time – bring the lot. If I ever hear another Beatles song it’ll be too soon), and then we moved for the time honoured tradition of Powerpoint Karaoke. I take it no-one got videos of my impression of a Sweedish IKEA designer? I’m not sure I can repeat that gig.
Thanks go to all the organisers for making it happen and the army of minions which spent the weekend running around making sure that stuff happened. We now need a month to recover. WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GEEKUP MANCHESTER TOMORROW?
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Euro Hotels London – Place to Avoid
I travel quite a bit. Mostly around the UK, I end up visiting clients all over the place. A travel and stay cheaply, I require very little. I ask for a clean room, half decent shower, and pleasant staff. That’s about it. I have stayed in some dodgy guest houses, scary hotels and borderline B&Bs. But on no occasion have I been a place quite like this. I was so impressed by their attempts to thwart my enjoyment of my stay I decided it deserved a blog post.
This is a long post with pictures. More below the cut.
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Geek Girl Dinner 4
We like Geek Girl Dinners. Pleasant company, good food, good conversations. Cat Ashton and I attended the fourth geek girl dinner in Manchester, this time being hosted at, Sweet Mandarin (who also host regular tweetups). This time, we had the company of Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson talking on http://www.geekery.in/ and community events, and Liv Wild from Thoughtworks, discussing productivity and happiness.
Good food. Good company. Awesome.
Also an awesome announcement that BAE Systems would be putting a large amount of cash behind the entire GGD movement. There’s also some mumblings of organising Girl Geek Teas, as a more frequent meet up with the same ideas of Geek Girl Dinners.
Here’s a few videos from the event. Apologies for the orientation – you would have thought that Youtube would give you an option to rotate them once they’re uploaded. Audio quality is a bit pants as well, taken on the phone. As is the video quality. In general, they’re a bit pants – but you can at least get a feel for how the evening went.