Office Hours — Today, December 23
| Dec 23 | 8:55 AM |
| Mark M. | has entered the room |
| Mark M. | turned on guest access |
| Dec 23 | 9:00 AM |
| mv.bharadwaj | has entered the room |
| mv.bharadwaj | hey mark, |
| Mark M. | howdy! |
| Dec 23 | 9:05 AM |
| mv.bharadwaj | i was planning on getting an android phone for dev. which would you recommend right now in the market? |
| mv.bharadwaj | i currently have the ADP, but i guess it has its cpu issues.. |
| Mark M. | I'm not sure what CPU issues you're referring to. |
| Mark M. | First question: is this for application development or firmware development? |
| mv.bharadwaj | sorry..application development |
| mv.bharadwaj | and i just mean, it's quite slow to do any hard real-time work on it.. |
| Mark M. | Second question: is this purely for development, or do you intend to use it for your personal phone? |
| mv.bharadwaj | i work on audio development mostly... |
| Mark M. | hmmm...maybe this didn't go through... |
| Mark M. | Second question: is this purely for development, or do you intend to use it for your personal phone? |
| mv.bharadwaj | whether
i would need to use it as a personal phone is still an open question to
me..but getting a phone like the droid is cheaper with a plan, so i was
considering that |
| Dec 23 | 9:10 AM |
| Mark M. | OK |
| Mark M. | The DROID definitely has its advantages: newest hardware, runs Android 2.0.1, faster CPU. |
| Mark M. | also, it has a keyboard, though only a three-row one (numbers require <alt> combo) |
| Mark M. | for
pure development, a keyboard probably isn't critical; for personal use,
you might be like me and prefer physical keyboards to virtual ones |
| Ross L. | has entered the room |
| Mark M. | howdy, Ross! |
| Mark M. | mv.bharadwaj: the downside of the DROID is that it's CDMA and so is pretty much locked to Verizon |
| mv.bharadwaj | i guess i am mainly aiming for a better cpu than the adp.. |
| Ross L. | Hi Mark, I'm having some problems finding all the deprecated values for the Contact info for Patchy. |
| Mark M. | mv.bharadwaj:
I can tell you that I have in my lab a G1, an Ion, a Hero, a Tattoo, a
CLIQ, a DROID, and an ARCHOS 5 Android tablet, and if I had to choose
just one for somebody to use, I'd go DROID (if CDMA/Verizon is OK) |
| Mark M. | Ross
Lumley: You'll need to run those tutorials on Android 1.6 or older. I
am rewriting them for Android 2.0 over the next couple of weeks. |
| mv.bharadwaj | ok.thanks.. |
| Mark M. | mv.bharadwaj: if CDMA/Verizon is an issue...an Ion (HTC Magic) is actually a fairly nice device |
| Mark M. | even if it's a bit older |
| Mark M. | Hero's
had too many quirks, I haven't had enough time with the CLIQ to form an
opinion, the Tattoo is QVGA, and the ARCHOS tablet is just plain
strange. |
| Dec 23 | 9:15 AM |
| Mark M. | But, if you can wait a few weeks, see whether those Nexus One rumors are true. |
| mv.bharadwaj | ok.. |
| mv.bharadwaj | my
next question: i have been hearing about the NDK having audio support
sometime in the future, would you happen to know any more about this? |
| Mark M. | mv.bharadwaj: No, I know nothing about future plans in general, let alone with the NDK |
| mv.bharadwaj | ok.. |
| Mark M. | though it certainly seems like an obvious move -- much easier to give the NDK access to audio than, say, the screen |
| mv.bharadwaj | i would think so too.. |
| Ross L. | Ok,
I wanted to target my development work to 2.0+ but I'll work on Patchy
with 1.6 .... btw .. your books are the best I've found and I have many
Android books. |
| Mark M. | Ross Lumley: Thanks! Watch for an update to the Tutorials before year's end, which will have this stuff working on 2.0.1 |
| Mark M. | BTW,
in case you guys aren't on the newsletter or missed my tweet, Version
1.3 of _The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development_ was
released earlier this week. |
| Mark M. | Specifically has rewritten examples for the new contacts stuff |
| Mark M. | though lots more needs to be written on *that* topic... |
| Dec 23 | 9:20 AM |
| Ross L. | Somehow I must have missed that even though I though I was on the newsletter list and twitter. |
| Mark M. | Oh, wait, actually, it went to the [cw-android] Google Group -- next newsletter isn't until early January. |
| Mark M. | But I definitely tweeted it. |
| Mark M. | (tweeted? is that the past tense of tweet? :-) |
| Ross L. | I wish the SDK had better documentation for mapping deprecated values |
| Ross L. | I think tweeted is probably the safest term |
| Mark M. | Oh, the Contacts to ContactsContract process left a lot to be desired. |
| mv.bharadwaj | it's def become a verb.. |
| Mark M. | Something of that size definitely should have been accompanied by an article, at least |
| Ross L. | I resolved everything in Patch other than "Default_Sort_Order" |
| Mark M. | Yeah, I don't think they're publishing those sort-order constants anymore |
| Mark M. | I don't remember seeing any |
| Ross L. | btw, for me, the Droid was the Android device that got me to switch from iPhone development |
| Dec 23 | 9:25 AM |
| mv.bharadwaj | mark:
will you have a chapter on multi-touch anytime soon .. ? (i dunno if i
missed it, if it already exists in the tutorials) .. |
| Mark M. | If by "anytime soon" you mean "sometime in 2010", I hope so |
| Mark M. | It's not high on the list, so it's probably in the second half of the year |
| mv.bharadwaj | sure.. ok.. |
| Ross L. | Mark, do you think for development purposes it's a good idea to apply the "root" patch to the Droid? |
| Mark M. | Well, I haven't rooted any of my devices, simply because I need them "normal" for my work. |
| Mark M. | I worry that something in the rooting might cause me to make faulty assumptions. |
| Mark M. | When I retire my G1 from active duty (e.g., if it never gets 2.0.1), I might root that one. |
| Ross L. | Ok, that's what I need to know, I haven't found a need to root the Droid but I'm somewhat new to working in Android |
| mv.bharadwaj | i think it's useful to root devices for better JNI debugging.. if you're using the ndk.. |
| mv.bharadwaj | the device has to be rooted in order to enable certain flags for debugging, like the extended JNI checks.. |
| Ross L. | I'll probably wait until I end up with a surplus device. Right now my Droid is also my primary phone |
| Dec 23 | 9:30 AM |
| mv.bharadwaj | yea, it's easy for the phone to get faulty when you do that.. i do that on a dedicated dev phone.. |
| Ross L. | I'm
a professor at The George Washington University and may try to have
students use your books for a class I'm planning for this summer. |
| Mark M. | I have a standing (if unpublicized) offer for free Warescriptions for college and university courses. |
| Ross L. | Wow! That makes it a no brainer choice :-) |
| Mark M. | If
you contact me from your gwu.edu address and can point to something in
the course catalog, I can set you up with codes for your students. |
| Ross L. | Ok, I will do that. |
| Mark M. | I've been to GWU a couple of times, though not in a decade-plus. I used to live in NoVA. |
| Ross L. | where do you live now? |
| Mark M. | Eastern PA. |
| Mark M. | As I said during the World Series, about an hour north of the Phillies and two hours west of the Yankees. |
| Dec 23 | 9:35 AM |
| Ross L. | I
was trying to plan for an iPhone development segment to this course but
the need to run on Macs was a show stopper. I much prefer the open
development environment of Android. |
| Ross L. | well that's specific enough .. pretty much pins it down |
| Mark M. | Yeah, if you don't have a Mac lab available, iPhone development for a course-ful of students would be a problem. |
| Mark M. | Though
I haven't had a chance to try out PhoneGap or Appcelerator Titanium
Mobile to see what they need in terms of developer equipment for iPhone. |
| Ross L. | There is a lot of student interest in mobile computing and cloud computing and in this course I plan to bring the 2 together |
| Mark M. | That's on my February list of things to do, as I begin work on _Android Beyond Java_. |
| Ross L. | I've looked at PhoneGap but I'm an OpenSource guy at heart even though I use a MacBook |
| Mark M. | Both PhoneGap and Titanium Mobile are open source. |
| Mark M. | at least, they were when I last checked |
| Mark M. | The iPhone, of course, is not. |
| Ross L. | yes PhoneGap definitely is |
| Mark M. | Yeah, the Appcelerator guys don't talk it up much, but their stuff is in a public github repo, or was about two months ago. |
| Ross L. | in
the apps that I plan to build, being able to run background services is
essential and with the iPhone I was going to have to run "background"
work on a server in the cloud and try to tie into the push notification
stuff |
| Dec 23 | 9:40 AM |
| Ross L. | The Patchy tutorial has been great in getting me started with background services on Android |
| mv.bharadwaj | this is an open question: any tips/avenues that you would recommend, I can explore for a job hunt on the android dev market... ? |
| Mark M. | By
the time it's done, Patchy's service is actually fairly respectable.
Early on, it's not very good, because I have to demonstrate it topic by
topic. |
| Mark M. | mv: Bob Stone's Hire*A*Droid is the closest thing I know of to a dedicated Android job source |
| Ross L. | Looking ahead at Tutorial 41 the service looks pretty good for my purposes |
| Mark M. | Lots of opportunities popping up on LinkedIn. |
| Dec 23 | 9:45 AM |
| Mark M. | Ross: Yeah, once the AlarmManager gets in there, TwitterMonitor gets to a vaguely sensible implementation. |
| Mark M. | Lacks all sorts of error handling and stuff |
| mv.bharadwaj | hmmm..yes. |
| Mark M. | But,
these are book examples, and in particular ones I use in training
classes, so there are limits to how elaborate they can get. |
| Ross L. | They
are quite adequate for a tutorial. I will look to the next generation
of Android books to cover services in more depth ... hopefully your
books |
| Mark M. | Between
the _Android_ and _Advanced Android_ books, there is probably 40-50
pages on services directly or things that are mostly for use by
services (e.g., AlarmManager) |
| Ross L. | do
you have any recommendations for a reader for your books on Android? I
tried to find a way to read the mobi format but ended up putting the
books on my droid as pdfs |
| Mark M. | Yeah, well, the MOBI format sucks for technical books. |
| Mark M. | No hope for monospace fonts, so I have to convert all the code listings to thinly-sliced JPEGs. |
| Mark M. | It doesn't look great even on the Kindle. |
| Mark M. | PDF is your best bet for now, and hope that I can get EPUB going soon. |
| Dec 23 | 9:50 AM |
| Ross L. | What format are the "Oreilly" books using? |
| Mark M. | O'Reilly usually publishes in all three major formats: PDF, MOBI, and EPUB. |
| Mark M. | EPUB is the direction for all non-Kindle dedicated ebook readers. |
| Ross L. | The Aldiko reader works ok for those books |
| Mark M. | Yes, there are at least three EPUB readers: Alkido, FBReaderJ, and Word-Player. |
| Ross L. | Is there a way of getting a log of these chats or should I just copy the screen? |
| Mark M. | I post links to the chat transcript on the [cw-android] Google Group after each chat ends. |
| Mark M. | |
| mv.bharadwaj | also, when is the next chat session? |
| Mark M. | I have two scheduled next week. The official calendar is available on your Warescription page. |
| Mark M. | 9am Monday and 8pm Wednesday, all times US Eastern. |
| mv.bharadwaj | ok.thanks. |
| Ross L. | thanks.
I need to get going now. Mark you are providing a great service, keep
up the good work. I don't know what holidays you all celebrate but if
there are any coming up ... have a happy holiday season ... if not have
a happy and safe week. For me it's time to prepare for Xmas. |
| Mark M. | Ross: thanks! |
| Dec 23 | 9:55 AM |
| Ross L. | has left the room |
| Mark M. | Well, I need to shut the room down and get to some other work. |
| mv.bharadwaj | thanks mark, for all your help.. and i really like your books.. have a good holiday. |
| Mark M. | Thanks, and likewise! |
| mv.bharadwaj | has left the room |
| Mark M. | turned off guest access |
Office Hours
People in this transcript
- Mark Murphy
- mv.bharadwaj
- Ross Lumley