Adam Speakman

Recently I’ve been realising more and more how much time I spend doing things that aren’t productive. Watching TV, playing video games, etc. While some down time is important, I’ve got all these ideas rattling around my head that I’d love to work on, but I keep putting off until some ever-distant ‘later’. So I’ve decided that for the next few months I’d like to be (more) productive, and I’m setting myself a challenge. I plan on implementing 20 Things in 20 Weeks. Some of these ideas are tiny apps, or blog posts, or scripts, and will only take a few hours to complete. Others are rather large and may take a few weeks of solid work.

Adding a support library to Android Studio is a bit different to how it’s done in Eclipse. Where you’d add a ‘project’ in Eclipse, in Studio you add a ‘Module’ (which is a sub-project of your overall application - similar to Projects in a Solution, if you’ve done any .NET development). In this post I detail how to add the Google Play Services project, but you should be able to follow the instructions to add any support library.

A few days ago I finally finished the application I’ve been working on in my spare moments over the last month or two. It’s called Wookmark Viewer and it’s a simple little app that lets you browse the latest images saved on Wookmark.com (Wookmark is an ‘image bookmarking’ site, so there’s all sorts of images from all over the web that get saved there). This was an interesting project for me, as I got to use a few different open source libraries (including one I ended up almost totally rewriting), switched IDE from Eclipse to IntelliJ, and had to figure out some new Android features I hadn’t used before.

This post-mortem picks apart what I enjoyed building, what caused me troubles, and what needs changing - the app is far from perfect.

After converting a Windows Phone 7 application (What’s Shaking, NZ?) to Windows Phone 8, I noticed a few deprecation warnings around the Maps SDK. Converting the code to use the WP8 Maps SDK instead was fairly straightforward, but there were a few gotchas which I’ve covered in this post.

I’ve been trying to clean up the What’s Shaking, NZ? for Windows Phone 7 codebase recently, as there was quite a bit of duplicated code and plenty of room for problems (read: shitty code). I’ll be migrating it to Windows Phone 8 soon, and want it as clean as possible before I start.

I had an interesting problem today where I needed to scale the default zoom for the map view for my Android app, depending on the screen size. I’d previously hardcoded it to a zoom level of 6. This worked nicely on my testing device (a Nexus One) and looked OK (but not great) on a Galaxy S3 - but I saw it last night on a Nexus 7 and it looked ridiculous. My desire was to have the map view show the whole of New Zealand, filling up as much of the screen as possible. On the Nexus 7, the country was tiny.

There’s a lot of good information out there already on setting up Octopress on Github. The Octopress documentation covers the subject in depth, as do assorted blog posts. However, perhaps it’s because I was drinking while doing it, or perhaps it was because I missed something while reading the guides, or my poor mental model of how things were supposed to work, or even that it was late at night, but I had a lot of trouble setting up What’s Shaking, NZ? on Github Pages.