Sharing the Code

Programming stuff that might be useful to others

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Threads and handlers in Android

On iOS you can get away with not being too concerned about the responsiveness of the UI when doing things like saving to the database but on Android the slugishness is noticeable. This is the scenaro – the user taps on a UI control which starts an operation that takes a small but noticeable time to complete – you are basically trying to avoid a non-responsive UI. If the operation is fairly short you can get away with using a Handler. This allows you access to the main UI thread’s message queue. If the operation is a bit longer, say a second or more you would want to use a thread.

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3 Tier Architecture For Mobile Development

As a way to learn mobile development I made an iPhone app which I subsequently ported to Android. I felt it important to at least support 2 platforms so that I would learn how to design apps with cross-platform in mind from the start. I’ve come to the conclusion that 3 tier architecture, which is familiar to those in enterprise web development, would be useful in dealing with the cross-platform issue.

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Comparing iOS and Android Development

Having created an Android version of my iPhone app Grocery Cook I thought I would share some thoughts on the differences between the two platforms. To boil it down, Android’s language of choice, Java is better than iOS’s Objective-C, but iOS has a more comprehensive API. Having full desktop Java on a mobile device is quite nice but you tend to have to create more code to make up for the holes in the API.

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Using Ant to build iOS apps for ad-hoc OTA distribution

I was over in Ireland for Christmas and I needed to do some work on an iPhone app but I don’t have a Mac laptop. I couldn’t get a hackintosh working on my Windows laptop that would run XCode 4. Initially I tried remotely accessing my Mac Mini with a program called iRAPP. It works like Windows Terminal Services so it’s a bit better than the built-in screen sharing (VNC). My broadband connection in Ireland wasn’t brilliant so there was quite a bit of latency but SSH worked fine so I decided to create an Ant script that would upload my source files to the Mac Mini and compile and deploy it to a server so I could install the app on my iPhone using ad-hoc over-the-air distribution.

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