Monday, August 26, 2013

Startups Seeking Adroid Devlopers

This will be a small rant. If you are a startup wtih a market fit of statistically ZERO 2 years after first seed capital funding round be bright enough to not effing lie and put on false android devloper seeking prodcesses to get free UX consulting.

Everyone the effing hell sees that trick a mile away as the information about your dire startup situation gets to us before we full respond to you in the first place and we walk  you around a wild goose chase of false UX help when that happens. And please understand that set of tricks indicates that you as a startup founder have ZERO professional skills as a founder., the street phrase is that YOU HAVE NO GAME..I have no respect fo your dumb Mfers...PERIOD. Want respect from a mobile developer stop being a dumb MFer.


And Chicago startups do not let Groupon's lack of ethics mislead you, ends never justify the means.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Blur View like iOS

Okay folks, want the only hint you need to implement it? Obviously, we are using renderscript, not  the alpha android.support.v8 lib if below 11.

Okay, first do not do the full background image. 2nd, do not downscale it. 3d, parallel it as in compute the blur one line at a time. Detect the scroll and than start the blur operation and set it up to do so many lines per iteration and than change background per iteration.

Now, smile as you have the yahoo weather android app blur effect on android.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Integrating with a Social Network for Startups

Okay, startups since you do not get this..Now the YELLING...

The advertising currency of a social network in order for your startup's mobile application to get huge user increases is the social status artifact of that social network. If your mobile application is not producing that artifact to include in a share post to a social network than your STARTUP IS ScreWEd..kind of simple is it not?

What are the social status artifacts or icons? Picture is the top one overall.  Picture and text is another assuming that the social status of the people commenting on said post adds to the visitor traffic. Than it degrades in visitor count effects depending upon the activity of the mobile application and the social network used.

For instance an events mobile application that posts shares of event pictures, event slides, event talks,etc will do better on Linekdin than some of the other social networks because linkedin's social status artifacts are a different mix than say facebook. If you do not even have this levle of marketing understanding as a startup than listen to the mobile developer and let them transform the ap pinto an actual product rather than just a feature set hoping for someone else to save the startup.


Friday, August 16, 2013

DroidUX

With the trend of Smartphone sales surpassing feature phones and 3 out of every 4 phones being sold being android its time for Android UX to rise above and be first rather than second and a clone of an IOS application. There is no excuse for someone claiming that if one concentrates in Android UX that someone does not know design.

Google could lead this with the right set of developer advocates. Google should led this s we do not want iOS application clones but a full android application experience.

That ability to develop a good android UX for an application extends to two areas, not just design but also android java coding.  Thus, I am wondering what an Android UX Google encouraged class may look like.

Sometime in September the best practices in android UX will be pushed out via my Google Drive account. DroidUX will have both the apk at my Google Drive account and some source code and its using ActionBarCompat rather than ActiionBarSherlock.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

AndroidStudio customize Gradle Classes

In its current implementation, android gradle plugin 5.6, you cannot use androidStudio to customize gradle classes for code quality enabling to handle the fact that the gradle code quality plugins do not recognize the android sourcesets.  So what to do?

You modify a task that uses the antbuilder to call the ant task and than use before and after stuff to put in the right build lifecycle task sequence. Supposedly the integration with jetGradle via the android gradle plugin will happen soon to eliminate having to do this hack not to mention Gradle project itself changing the code quality plugins to recognize android sourcesets sometime in the next release of Gradle.

Monday, August 12, 2013

AndroidStudio Gralde lesson 3

Seth Rylan teaches us that if its not in gradle right now, than write it with his post on how to rewrite tasks to recognize android sourcesets for the gradle code quality plugins at here. Note, he hard wires config and reports in his urls which you might not want to do that and use the Gradle variables to represent hose directories so it can recognize both the defaults and user settings.

Friday, August 9, 2013

AndroidStudio101 Gradle lesson 2

Not so much a gradle lesson as an AndroidStudio/IntelliJ lesson.  Some times you will get the Gradle error that it cannot delete classes during the clean task.

Instead of running rebuild project run Make Project under the build menu.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Android Studio Gradle 101 First Lesson

Okay, the first lesson. You need to load the local.properties file and set debug keystore location in the file...


ant { property(file:'../local.properties') }

Than in rest of it: signingConfigs { debug { storeFile file(ant.properties['debug.keystore']) storePassword 'android' keyAlias 'androiddebugkey' keyPassword 'android' } }

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

AndroidStudio lives

Okay so Android Studio seems better now:

The gradle plugin documentation and android studio documentation is playing catch-up. But, for now most of the time you can hand edit the gradle build file and get it set up as the gradle sample zip  has hints. The main thing is the project stuff as the UI wizards in the IDE or not finished/enabled yet.

BTW, if migrating from eclipse in the global settings change the compiler setting to ecj as it android studio and Intellij come bundled with it and it decreases your build time by about 45%.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

ActionBar Compat Ready for Prime time?

At GoogleIO Google updated the ActionBarCompat to be able to use it for API 7 and up. Is it ready to replace SherlockActionBar?

It does have CompatThemes for apis below HoneyComb..hmm I think its time for test to see if it can..maybe a UX/UI patterns app.