Blog-Birthday Four

One more year of blogging passed. It has been a year a bit troubled by the shut down of my old provider (i.ph) and the passage to Blogspot. The platform change brought to an inevitable loss in visits but my will to blog my experiences is still the same. So thanks to all my visitors and ... Stay tuned!

Android programming : Exploring sensors

Sensors are one of the the things that make mobile development different, and interesting, from the programming of our desktop computers. Modern mobile devices with their combined capabilities of communicating, imaging and sensing surrounding environment looks more like a pocket version of a artificial satellite than a desktop computer. This is why, after initial hello-worlding, the first thing I've been looking for in the 'net has been how to read sensors in an Android application. I got several examples like here, all showing how to read a single sensor. I decided so to make more interesting these basic examples in order to build a simple user interface able to discover and read available sensors on a device.

The user interface design

After reading about sensors on Android worked I refined my idea on how the user interface: a selector (also known as spinner) on the top filled with available sensors list, some details on the selected sensor just under the selector and sensors values updating on the bottom.

User interfaces (activities) layout is defined, in Android programming, trough a XML file. Eclipse Android development plug-in provides a handy graphical user interface to arrange activity layout. It worked for me well enough even if I went to manual XML editing a couple of times just to make things a little faster. Eclipse plug-in also provide a lot of useful warnings, to a beginner like me, like reminding not to place hard-coded strings in your interface. By the way here is, at last, my interface definition.

Test Drive: Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” on the EEEPC

Ubuntu's upgrade season at last arrived. I must say I haven't paid a lot of attention, this time, to the new release (I even missed the beta release date) and to the endless discussions that usually follow any new version. By the way I downloaded Ubuntu and prepared my old 1GB flash drive in order to give it at least a look.

First impressions

The boot time seems good even with the increased disk image size (and my slow flash disk drive). Here is how the new release looks, just after the boot.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” (on the Veriton S661)

The upgrade season arrived at last. As soon I got enough free time, last week-end, I started the upgrade process on my desktop computer.


Doing the upgrade

At first, since the installed version was a LTS one, I had to enable notification for any new versions in the “software sources” configuration.

after that the update manager activated the “Upgrade” button

Android Development on Netbeans (and the EEEPC)

In my previous post I moved my first steps in Android development world by installing Android SDK and Eclipse IDE on my desktop computer. After successfully writing my first Android hello-world I went, almost immediately, on how to do Android development on the EEEPC 900. If it's true the desktop computer is much more suited for writing code it's the EEEPC tho one I always bring with me and I use for my experiments.

I'm a big fan of Eclipse and I use it everyday at work but, when it comes using it on a netbook, it performs very poorly. Worst of all some Eclipse configuration windows are too big to fit into the small EEEPC screen and even lack of scroll-bars. This is why I use Netbeans on the EEEPC. After a brief looking-up on the 'net I came to NBAnroid plug-in page.

Installing Netbeans to 7.2

Even if it isn't required I decided to upgrade my Netbeans installation to the latest 7.2 version. I so removed previous version by launching Netbeans removal script

sudo /usr/local/netbeans-7.1.2/uninstall.sh

then I downloaded latest Netbeans version from its download page and launched the auto-installing script

chmod +x netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh

sudo ./netbeans-7.2-ml-javase-linux.sh

this started the usual Netbeans installation wizard 

after some “I agree” and several “Next” I got the new version installed.

Installing Android SDK

Like in my previous post I downloaded Android SDK from Google's page and extracted it on my home folder

mkdir android

mv Downloads/android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz android/
cd android/
tar -xf android-sdk_r20.0.3-linux.tgz