Traditional media is no longer the only source of news. Internet and social media have become the main platform for news sharing.
According to Pew Research Center 62% of Americans get their news from social media. This means anyone can create and share news stories, regardless of their truthiness.
I use Chrome extensions all the time and decided it was time to figure out how to make my own. I found it to be incredibly easy and I’d like to share with you some of the basics, as well as an example of an extension I made. Let’s get started!
One of the main reasons for having coding standards is to keep your code readable by everyone. By enforcing standards and formatting, the code base becomes consistent, and anyone can easily understand the structure of the code because he will be more familiar with what to expect. It is also very useful when a new developer joins the team because once he is familiar with the patterns, he will be able to easily read the existing code, which results in a more pleasant experience.
On Thursday, October 31st Google announced their new flagship phone, the Nexus 5. Along with their newest device they announced it would ship with Android 4.4, codenamed “KitKat” (much to the surprise of the entire Android community that was expecting “Key Lime Pie”.)
I received my Nexus 5 on November 7th, and have had some time to get used to KitKat as well as the device itself. Originally this post was going to review the device and the new Android version, but instead I want to discuss several of the key changes that have been introduced with 4.4 and my thoughts on them.
The Android library is constantly growing. New widgets are built, and existing ones get deprecated. We’ll see how we can make XML layouts versioning more maintainable and more OO using the <include/> element. For that we’ll take as an example the ActionBarSherlock SearchView.
Google’s AppEngine is a very useful platform in the way it allows developers to have an application server up and running within 10 minutes.
It leverages the Google infrastructure, too, offering high speed, high capacity, etc.
Wow (Awesome!)
However (Hmm), AE does not allow for the usual multi-threading mechanisms…
Web mapping services are become more popular as more applications are required to display a considerable amount of data on a map. Applications use a map view most of the time to show single points but clusters of data are becoming more popular.
Before moving forward with any of the web mapping services, it is better to understand what the application really needs from the map provider. In this case our system needs just two features:
· Clustering data
· Showing a single marker on the map