More Than Technical

Archive for the ‘Java’ Category

So, been working hard on my projects, and discovered some interesting things in Android possibilities for frame animation. Last time I was using an HTML approach, because of memory consumption issues with using ImageViews. However now my approach is using View.onDraw(Canvas) to draw BMPs straight off files, in an asynchronous way, and it seems to work pretty good.
Let me tell you how I did it
Read the rest of this entry »

My adventures of getting frame animation on the Android 2.1 continue, and take a turn for the worse. Will I come up victorious in the end? Not sure…

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi

Just a quick share of lessons learned about Android’s Frame-by-Frame animations. Some of the functionality is poorly documented, as many people point out, so the web is the only place for answers. Having looked for some answers to these questions and couldn’t find any – here’s what I found out myself.

Update [2/3/11]: A new post on this topic gives a more broad view of my experience.
Read the rest of this entry »

On one of my Android apps, I added a trivial option to select a contact from the phone’s contact list. This was working fine until SDK version 5, which changed the way the contacts are represented in the phone’s SQLite database. It is using the “newer” class called ContactsContract instead of the deprecated People class

I have spent quite time in order to figure out which was the best way that will fit my needs. If you are in the same position, feel free to use the code below

My example below is will display a two row list of all the contacts, with alphabetical indexing. It is a mixture of code snippets I have found on the net, while may not be optimized; it will definitely give you the hang of things.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi!
Long time no post… MIT is kicking my ass with work. But it was amazing to come back to so many comments with people anxious to get OpenCV going mobile!
Anyway, just wanted to share my work on object detection using OpenCV2.1 on the Android.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi
In the past few weeks I have been working hard at a few projects for end-of-term at Uni. One of the projects is what I called “SmartHome”, for Embedded computing [link] course, is a home monitoring [link] application. In the course the students were given an LPC2148 arm7-MCU (NXP) based education board, implemented by Embedded Artists [link]. My partner Gil and I decided to work with ZigBee extension modules [link] to enable remote communication.

Here are the steps we took to bring this project to life.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi everyone

In the last weekend I attended GeekCon 2009, a tech-conference, with a friend and colleague Arnon (not Arnon from the blog, who recently had a birthday – Happy B-Day Arnon!). Each team that attended had to create a project they can complete in 2-days of the conference. Our project is called “RunVas”, and the basic idea was to let people run around and paint by doing so. We wanted to combine computer vision with a little artistic angle.

Here’s some more details
Read the rest of this entry »

A very basic feature that I was missing in my Android phone is the ability to save a number while I’m in a call. Sure you can go to the home screen, and open up any app with a textbox, but I decided to create a dedicated application.

So, meet Number Saver!
UPDATE: Number Saver got a new look

Basic usage guide:

When you open the app you will get the main screen:

From here you are able to enter the number, copy to the clipboard, and clear the clipboard if it is full. Also, when you open the app, if there is a text in the clipboard it will already be in the text box. So you can press Dial to instantly dial the number

Also, during an active call you will notice the note and pencil icon. Stretching the notification area will give you the option to launch the application.

This app is available for free through the Android market. Donation is always welcome …

Last week I finished my first Android application. All through the development stage I had to Google a lot for examples which some were really hard to find (even though you can find reference for everything in the SDK, for me, it’s easier to understand from a code sample).

My mobile company allows you to send 10 free daily SMS through their website, and after that each text message is still half priced, so I decided to take a challenge and create a UI that allows me to send my messages from the phone through the website automatically.

The core of my software was pure java, so even though it wasn’t straight forward to accomplish, I kinda know the material.

The main issues were after – when I got to the android implementation and UI

Here are the issues I needed, and will supply examples for in this post:
(Of course – for you that are more experienced than me with Android development, please forgive if I’m not doing everything ‘by the book’, it’s simply what I could find. So if you have any suggestions or improvement please send them to me or post a comment J )

• How to find out if there is an active network on the device
• How to create options menu
• How to create and clear notification in the notification area
• How to declare your program as “SMS Sender” (‘Complete action using…’)
• Taking care of orientation (Landscape and Portrait mode for UI)

Here is the code I ended up using. Hope you find it helpful
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi

The graphics course I took at TAU really expanded my knowledge of 3D rendering, and specifically using OpenGL to do so. The final task of the course, aside from the exam, was to write a 3D game. We were given 3 choices for types of games: worms-like, xonix-like and lightcycle-like. We chose to write our version of Worms in 3D.

I’ll try to take you through some of the problems we encountered, the decisions we made, and show as much code as possible. I’m not, however, gonna take you through the simple (yet grueling) work of actually showing meshes to the screen or moving them around, these subjects are covered extensively online.

The whole game is implemented in Java using JOGL and SWT for 3D rendering. The code is of course available entirely online.

Read the rest of this entry »