Our most recent in house project was a fun children’s game called Whack Attack, and was built with Unity 3D and released for iPhones and android devices. Unity is a great tool, but it is definitely (and obviously) more geared for game crafting in the third dimension. Our game deals mostly with two dimensional sprites, although they are set in a pseudo 3d environment to attain some basic perspective.
On a recent project, we needed a widget that would allow users to select a photo from their Facebook albums. “Surely the new Facebook Android SDK must support this.” I thought. Alas, my hopes were unfulfilled. “Well, I bet there is a third-party solution for this!”, I surmised, but again, my search was for naught. At this point I decided to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
The Mystical 9 patch
You Do What Android Want = Android Do What You Want
Part 1: The Mystical 9-Patch
I recently encountered some blank stares from some colleagues regarding certain aspects of the 9-patch.
Granted, there doesn’t seem to be all that much documentation out there explaining the ins and outs of nine patch, possibly adding to the mystique, but then again, maybe there isn’t all that much to explain.
Here I’ll outline the basics of the 9-patch, and you can comment as to whether it indeed makes simple sense… or instead, communicate your own blank stare with some scathing criticism below in the comments section.
As powerful and useful as Git is, it’s not all fun and games. It can be down right intimidating and hard to use.
But with some customization on your part, and some changes to your team’s Git workflow, Git can become a far more tammer beast to conquer.
Like any working professional, software engineers are extremely busy. There is more code to write than there is time. For this, we can be very picky with which tools we choose to communicate. A normal day can be filled with meetings, email , and then actually trying to write code. For the engineer, we have time for few things, and writing code is top priority. So, what’s the best method for getting a developer’s attention?
Here’s some tactics that will help you get in touch quickly with the guys building the next best life changing tools.
I’m writing this post from Mysore, India where I’m working for the entire month of February.
Coming here was a nail-biter for me, but not because of typical western concerns like bedbugs, heat, smog, or monsoons. What terrified me was the idea of traveling all this way and not being able to do my job effectively. I oversee operations and finances at Grio, participate in business development, and am currently managing two projects. If anything were to prevent me from working, I would need to grab the next flight and go home – arriving a minimum of 40 hours later!
AngularJS is one of the most used Javascript frameworks nowadays.
A characteristic of this framework is the possibility of binding input or output parts of an HTML page to a model represented by standard JavaScript variables.
Looping through arrays and collections is made easy by the ngRepeat directive.
This directive becomes handy when dealing with lists and tables, especially if associated to the AngularJS filters, which allow you to handle pagination, filtering and sorting by adding just one line of code to your html.
Unfortunately, one of the limitations of this approach is that the filtering is done client-side, therefore it wouldn’t be an optimal solution when dealing with a substantial number of rows/records.
I recently reviewed a SQL query that was returning duplicate results. Since I expected, and needed, a single result from the query this was a problem. Here’s an explanation of why this bug occurred, and several different ways it can be resolved.
Core Data is a framework provided by Apple that allows developers to design, build and interact with a database, without ever having any direct interaction with SQL.