Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Alternative to Fragments

Square is doing a different approach that is an alternative to fragments, called Mortar. The idea is thin views paired with controllers and using their Flow library to describe screens and Dagger for fast dependency injection.

At this point not everyone is using Mortar at square and Mortar is still very alpha. But its interesting that someone is attempting to solve MVC patterns in android by suggesting a non fragment route.

Monday, December 30, 2013

New Device

It is somewhat surprising if you  have not shopped for an android device recently, that you can get a quality android smartphone that comes very close to Samsung high line android devices for under $50. Bill Gates use to have a saying that a desktop computer for everyone, he might have missed an accurate prediction by a bit.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Eclipse4.3Gradle

I think the Eclipse ADT 23 with gradle builds might be coming soon as I just discovered that if you convert a project to the gradle nature in Eclipse 4.3 than it does trigger a build through gradle sort of in that I see the gradle cache created.


Thursday, December 12, 2013

Managing Classpath, EclipseAndroidGradle

In Intellij and Android Studio Gradle is more of first class citizen than in Eclipse. Thus, we have to find a way to manage the Eclipse classpath rather than create a whole lot of extra work.

Thus, first get IVYDE plugin from ASF as it setsup an Ivy Cache container for Eclipse, in other words you can load project libs for project via the ivy.xml file during IDE setup which takes care of code completion, etc.

Gradle build script wise rather than write the whole file again in groovy terms you can make use of this new gradle plugin by Blaine Simpson, gradle-ivyxml-plugin.

The jar is at maven2 repo. Because IVY can handle maven that means it also can handle aar android project library files as well.


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

EclipseAndroid Gradle

Okay, so working on hacking up gradle/groovy to enable Android Gradle Builds with Eclipse. If you want  to follow along with me, you should complete some of these steps before my next post with details..

1. Download and install artifactory that way I can instruct you on how to do local mane and ivy repos so you can do everything offline.  Artifactory is easier than Nexus or Archiva.

2. Not required, but it makes it easier if you move your note taking and project page creation to one entire system. Fro myself I am moving all my project page creation and note taking stuff to using TiddlyWikiFive as it supports mobile out-of-box and twitter bootstrap and can be accessed and used on mobile and can create big MB and GB sized files without major problems.