Features

When the Plugin is installed it automatically adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username. You don’t need to edit the theme file at all. Isn’t that cool enough

Screenshot

Download

You can download the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

As usual try out the Plugin and do let me know if you have any feedback, queries or comments.

PS: BTW RoloPress 1.2 has been released with lot of new features. Don’t forget to check it out.

Possibly Related posts

• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• Year End Stats 0.3 (Dec 30, 2008)
• WordPress to FriendFeed Plugin (Aug 3, 2008)
• WordPress Plugin readme generator now supports changelog (Jun 24, 2009)
• WordPress Plugin Readme File Generator (Mar 28, 2009)

SQLiteOpenHelper

Android SDK provides a class called SQLiteOpenHelper which can be used for interfacing with this SQLite database that is associated with your application.

SQLiteOpenHelper has two methods which can be used for creating/updating the database. They are the following.

onCreate

The onCreate() method gets called when the app gets installed for the first time. The SQL code to create the database should go in this method. In addition to the SQL code we should also specify a version number for the database which will be used subsequently during upgrades.

onUpgrade

The onUpgrade() method gets called when the app is upgraded or if the version number specified in the app is greater than the one which is present in the database. Typically this function contains Alter table SQL code which will be used to upgrade the database.

In addition to the above two methods, the SQLiteOpenHelper also has other methods which can be used to access the database. One such method is getWritableDatabase()

getWritableDatabase

The getWritableDatabase() method will return a SQLiteDatabase object which has reference to the database. You can read more about this method from android documentation.

In addition to these methods, the SQLiteOpenHelper class other methods but the above there are the notable ones. You can read more about the SQLiteOpenHelper class from the android documentation.

Selecting data from the database

To selected data from the database, we have to call the query() method on the SQLiteDatabase object which is returned by the getWritableDatabase() method above.

The query() method returns an object of type Cursor, which can be iterated over to retrieve the resultset. The following code snippet explains the query() method.

private void loadTasks() {
	currentTasks = new ArrayList<Task>();
	Cursor tasksCursor = database.query(TASKS_TABLE,
			new String[] {TASK_ID, TASK_NAME, TASK_COMPLETE},
			null, null, null, null, String.format("%s,%s", TASK_COMPLETE, TASK_NAME));
 
	tasksCursor.moveToFirst();
	Task t;
	if (! tasksCursor.isAfterLast()) {
		do {
			int id = tasksCursor.getInt(0);
			String name = tasksCursor.getString(1);
			String boolValue = tasksCursor.getString(2);
			boolean complete = Boolean.parseBoolean(boolValue);
			t = new Task(name);
			t.setId(id);
			t.setComplete(complete);
			currentTasks.add(t);
		} while(tasksCursor.moveToNext());
	}
}

Inserting data into the database

In order to insert the data into the database we have to call the insert() method of the SQLiteDatabase. The data that needs to be inserted should be added to a ContextValues object and then passed to the insert() method. The ContextValues object is like a HashMap which contains the key and the value for each column of the row that will be inserted.

The insert() method returns the id of the row that was inserted. The following code snippet explains the insert() method.

public void addTask(Task t) {
	ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
	values.put(TASK_NAME, t.getName());
	values.put(TASK_COMPLETE, Boolean.toString(t.isComplete()));
 
	t.setId(database.insert(TASKS_TABLE, null, values));
	currentTasks.add(t);
}

Updating data in the database

To update data in the database we have to call the update() method of the SQLiteDatabase object. Like the insert() method, the data that needs to be updated should be passed in a ContextValues object.

The following code snippet explains the update() method.

public void saveTask(Task t) {
 
	ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
	values.put(TASK_NAME, t.getName());
	values.put(TASK_COMPLETE, Boolean.toString(t.isComplete()));
 
	long id = t.getId();
	String where = String.format("%s = %d", TASK_ID, id);
	database.update(TASKS_TABLE, values, where, null);
}

Deleting data from the database

To delete data from the database we have to call (guess what ) the delete() method of the SQLiteDatabase objet. The delete() method takes the where condition based on which the rows will be deleted.

public void deleteTasks(Long[] ids) {
	StringBuffer idList = new StringBuffer();
	for (int i =0; i< ids.length; i++) {
		idList.append(ids[i]);
		if (i < ids.length -1 ) {
			idList.append(",");
		}
	}
 
	String where = String.format("%s in (%s)", TASK_ID, idList);
	database.delete(TASKS_TABLE, where, null);
}

You can read more about this method from android documentation.

Demo App Sourcecode

The demo TaskManager app that we have been using in the previous classes was modified to store the tasks in the database. You can find the source code from my github page. I am also working in this week’s homework and will be posting the explanation and source code once I am done.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)
• Android application that triggers the phone dial screen (Feb 13, 2010)

ArrayAdapter

ArrayAdapter is a special kind of ListAdapter which supplies data to ListView. You can refer to my notes for last week to know about ListView and ListAdapter. You can also read about ArrayAdapter in android documentation.

Adding views

First create an empty android project. Then edit the main.xml layout file to add a ListView. Then create another layout xml file which will contain the TextView (or any component) that will be displayed within the ListView.

Editing Activity

The next step is to change the generated activity class to extend from ListActivity. This is very important because only a ListActivity will be able to display the ListView.

Binding the adapter

The next step is to bind the ArrayAdapter to the ListActivity. We can do this by calling the setListAdapter() method.

To this method we have to pass an object of type ArrayAdapter. You can pass an object reference to this method or we can even create a new anonymous method like below.

setListAdapter(new ArrayAdapter<string>(this, R.layout.list_item, strings) {
	@Override
	public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
		View row;
 
		if (null == convertView) {
			row = mInflater.inflate(R.layout.list_item, null);
		} else {
			row = convertView;
		}
 
		TextView tv = (TextView) row.findViewById(android.R.id.text1);
		tv.setText(getItem(position));
 
		return row;
	}
});

We have to override the getView() method of the ArrayAdapter class to create the TextView (or any other component) which will be created for each list.

Finishing up

So that’s it, you are done. All you have to do now is to save the project and run it in the emulator. If everything is done properly, then you can see the list of items displayed in the ListView like below.

Source code

I have uploaded the entire project source code into github and you download it from there and verify it with your code.

Try to complete the homework, before the next session and do come back to view the notes and the homework for the next session too.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)
• Android application that triggers the phone dial screen (Feb 13, 2010)

Over the years I have released lot of code out in the wild and I thought of consolidating all of them in Github, so that it can be of use to someone who might need them. At last I found some time and uploaded most of them to my Gitbub account.

Below is the description of some of those projects which are currently there in my Github account.

Bright Light

Bright Light is the WordPress theme, which is powering up my blog. I have released it out hoping that it might be useful for someone.

Android Samples

I created this project to share my homework and the sample code used in the “Developing Android Applications in Java” online class, which I am currently following.

RoloPress core and RoloPress Default

These projects contain my contribution to RoloPress, a WordPress based contact manager. You can read more about WordPress from its homepage.

FeedBurner – stats

FeedBurner-stats is a Google Gadget which allows you to keep track of your Feedburner subscriber count. It uses Google Chart API and Google Gadget API.

Bloglines Notifier

Bloglines Notifier is a Google Gadget which will notify you the count of unread items in your Bloglines account. (Hope someone is still using Bloglines )

Retweet

It is a fork of John Resig’s retweet script which I am using in my Easy Reweet WordPress Plugin. I have added a new feature to this script which allows you to associate the list of urls created to your bit.ly account.

Count Words

It’s a small Ruby script which prints the number of words (with their count) present in a given text file

Bulk unrar

It is a small Ruby script which unrars all files found in all the subdirectories of a director given in the command line.

I am still undecided about porting my WordPress Plugins from the official WordPress Plugin repository to Github. I guess it is better to have my Plugins in the Plugin repository for now.

BTW feel free to fork any of these projects and I would be happy to pull in your changes if you have added some enhancements to them.

Possibly Related posts

• Updated FeedBurner stats Google Gadget (Jun 11, 2009)
• Google Gadget to keep track of your FeedBurner stats (Feb 17, 2008)
• Bright Light, a free WordPress theme (Feb 11, 2010)
• Bloglines Notifier – My First Google Gadget (Nov 4, 2006)
• Associating urls created with bit.ly API to your account (Aug 21, 2009)

Support for trash

WordPress 2.9 introduced the concept of trash, which allows you to move posts to trash (like Recycle bin in Windows or Trash in Mac) instead of deleting them directly.

I have added support for trash to my Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin. Now you can choose whether you want to delete the posts directly or just move them to trash. The credit for this feature goes to David Wren, you contributed code for this functionality.

Batch Deletes

I have also enabled another option which will be quite handy when you want to delete tons of posts. The most popular complain I hear from users of my Plugin is that, the PHP script times out if there were more than 1000 posts.

One possible solution is to increase the timeout period in php.ini file. But changing php.ini values is quite difficult especially if you were on a shared host.

I have now added support for batch deletes which allows you to delete the posts in batches. Say suppose you have to delete 5000 posts, you can now delete them in 5 batches with 1000 in each batch instead of trying to delete all the 5000 posts in a single go which usually results in script timeout. Hope this helps most of the users.

Screenshot

Below is the screenshot of the updated admin screen of the Plugin.

Support for translation

I have also generated the pot file for the Plugin and is available with the Plugin. If you are willing to do translation for the Plugin, use the pot file to create the .po files for your language and let me know. I will add it to the Plugin after giving credit to you.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below or contact me.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Possibly Related posts

• Bulk Delete Posts in WordPress (Feb 2, 2009)
• Bulk Delete now supports deletion by date (Jul 13, 2009)
• Bulk Delete now supports deleting pending and scheduled posts (Jul 22, 2009)
• Bulk Delete 0.3 (Apr 14, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)

Replace TextView with ListView

In this week’s session, the demo app that was created last week was modified to use the ListView element instead of TextView.

The ListView provides a nice UI for displaying the list of tasks together with a checkbox to indicate whether they were complete or not.

Screenshot

You can see the new UI of the application in the following screenshots.

ListView and ListAdapter

ListView is a control which can be used for creating list of scrollable items. The data to the ListView will be provided by ListAdapter.

You can think of ListView as the “view” component in a MVC framework and ListAdapter as the “model”

The class which is going to act as the ListAdapater should implement following methods

• getCount()
• getItem()
• getItemId()
• getView()

You can read more about ListView and ListAdapter from android documentation.

Adding ListView

To add ListView to any activity, we have to include the <ListView /> tag to the activity’s layout xml. In our sample app, the ListView tag is added to the main.xml file.

The Activity class that uses ListView should implement the ListActivity instead of plain Activity class. In our sample app, the ViewTasksActivity class is derived from the ListActivity class.

Magic ids

Android SDK provides some predefined ids which can be used some specific purposes. One such “magic id” is android:empty.

We can assign this to any element that we want to be displayed when the ListView is empty.

Homework

This week’s homework is to Build a simpler (but less flexible) way to load data into a list using an ArrayAdapter (instead of a BaseAdapter). I would be completing the homework and would be posting the explanation and the source code later this week. So stay tuned

Source code

I have uploaded source code for yesterday’s session in github and you can download it from there. I am also working in this week’s homework and will be posting the explanation and source code once I am done.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)
• Android application that triggers the phone dial screen (Feb 13, 2010)

Preference API

Android provides a preference API, using which we can store task information. The preference API is very simple to use and all we have to do is to get the instance to the preference object from the Application object and then call the getString() and putString() method.

Serializing ArrayList to string

The only tricky part of the home work is that, since the preference API supports only storing and retrieving of strings, we have to serialize and de-serialize the ArrayList object which has the list of tasks into string.

Instead of writing my own code to do this conversion, I used the code from the Apache Pig project. You can check out the class from the pig’s github page.

Storing the task

In the addTask() method of the TaskManagerApplication class, we have to get the instance of the shared preference and then store the serialized ArrayList using the putString() method.

	public void addTask(Task t) {
		assert(null != t);
		if (null == currentTasks) {
			currentTasks = new ArrayList<task>();
		}
		currentTasks.add(t);
 
		//save the task list to preference
		SharedPreferences prefs = getSharedPreferences(SHARED_PREFS_FILE, Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
		Editor editor = prefs.edit();
		try {
			editor.putString(TASKS, ObjectSerializer.serialize(currentTasks));
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		editor.commit();
	}

Retrieving the task

Similarly we have to retrieve the list of tasks from the preference in the onCreate() method

	public void onCreate() {
		super.onCreate();
		if (null == currentTasks) {
			currentTasks = new ArrayList<task>();
		}
 
		//		load tasks from preference
		SharedPreferences prefs = getSharedPreferences(SHARED_PREFS_FILE, Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
 
		try {
			currentTasks = (ArrayList<task>) ObjectSerializer.deserialize(prefs.getString(TASKS, ObjectSerializer.serialize(new ArrayList<task>())));
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

Finishing up

So that’s it, you are done. All you have to do now is to save the project and run it in the emulator. If everything is done properly, the tasks that you enter will be saved even after you restart the app.

Source code

I have uploaded the entire project source code into github and you download it from there and verify it with your code.

Try to complete the homework, before the next session and do come back to view the notes and the homework for the next session too.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)
• Android application that triggers the phone dial screen (Feb 13, 2010)

Demo Application

In this week’s session, he created a sample task manager app which can be used for maintaining list of things to track. This app was created using Android 1.6 with Google API support. You can download the source code of this demo app below.

The sample app will have two activities. One will have a simple data entry form which can be used to add tasks and the other to view tasks which were entered. Check the screenshots below to see how the sample app looks like.

Layouts

Tony (the instructor) briefly explained about the different types of layouts and for the sample apps he used Relative Layout. You can read more about the relative layout from the android documentation.

The major pain point in using Relative layout is that, the controls should be specified in the order in which they are referenced and not in the order in which they will be displayed.

EditText control

EditText control is an editable control which can be used to get user input. It is similar to the HTML textbox or the Java Swing JTextField.

You can read more about EditText control from android documentation.

Sharing data between views

An application can have multiple activities (views) and to share data between these multiple activities, the android framework provides a class called Application. This Application class can be accessed from all the activities of the app by calling the getApplication() of the Activity class. Tony explained this about this class and also used it in the demo app to store and retrieve tasks from multiple activities.

You can find this class in the TaskManagerApplication.java in the sample app. You can download the source code of this demo app below.

Safe cancelling

Tony also explained about how to listen to text changes and make sure the user is not moving away from the activity when there are unsaved work.

You can check the cancel() method in AddTaskActivity class, where we will be showing an alert box (see screenshot) using the built in AlertDialog, whenever the user clicks the cancel button without saving the task that he has entered.

You can read about the AlertDialog class in the android documentation.

Source code

I have uploaded source code for yesterday’s session in github and you can download it from there. I am also working in this week’s homework and will be posting the explanation and source code once I am done.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Overview – My Notes (Feb 10, 2010)

I just finished it and I thought of posting the source code and explanation so that it will be useful for others too.

Creating the project

The first step is to create the android project. You should follow the instructions given in the android documentation. You would need Eclipse and the android SDK to be installed to do this.

You will have an empty project to start with and with the default project structure, which I explained in my previous post.

Adding the button to the view

If you have followed the first session then you know that adding a button to the view is quite easy. All you have to do is to open your view file (/res/layout/main.xml) and add the following code.

<Button
    android:id="@+id/dialer_button"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="@string/dialer"
/>

You should also declare the value for the @string/dialer key in your values (/res/values/strings.xml) file by adding the following line

<string name="dialer">Phone Dialer</string>

Adding the button to the activity

After adding the button to the view, we have to declare the button in the activity. To do so, we have to add the following line in the Activity file.

Button dialerButton = (Button)findViewById(R.id.dialer_button);

Bind the Listener to the button

After creating the button instance in the activity, we have to bind a click listener to it. In the click listener we have to invoke the Phone dialer intent. Add the following code to the activity

dialerButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
	@Override
	public void onClick(View v) {
		//open the phone dialer on clicking the button
		Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_DIAL);
		startActivity(intent);
	}
});

In the above snippet the following line does the trick

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_DIAL);

It creates the intent, which will open the phone dialer.

Finishing up

So that’s it, you are done All you have to do now is to save the project and run it in the emulator. If everything is done properly, you will see the following screen in the emulator.

When you click the button, it should open the phone dialer.

Source code

I have uploaded the entire project source code into github and you download it from there and verify it with your code.

Try to complete the homework, before the next session and do come back to view the notes and the homework for the next session too.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)

Android project structure

After you create a new project in eclipse, you will see the following top-level folders in your package explorer.

Let me explain each of them in detail

/src

This folder will contain the Java source files that you will be creating. In the screenshot you can see the ‘activity’ files that were created for the sample project. The files inside this  folder will be organized according to the package structure. This is similar to the /src folder which is present in any normal Java project.

/gen

This is also a source folder, but will be contain Java source files that will be automatically generated by the android platform. Notable among the generated Java files is the R class, which you see in the screenshot. The framework will generate R class file and you can read more about it in the android documentation.

/Android {version Number}

This is the folder, which will contain the libraries (jars) that are need for the project. In the screenshot, you can see that it contains the framework jar file. This is similar to the /lib folder which is present in any normal Java project.

/res

This directory contains all the external resources (images, data files etc) that are used by the android application. These external resources (content) will be referenced in the android application.

This contains the following sub-folders

• /res/drawable
• /res/layout
• /res/Values

/res/drawable

This folder contains all images, pictures etc. If you want to include an image or an icon in your android application, then you will be placing it in this folder.

/res/layout

This folder contains the UI layouts that will be used in the project. These UI layouts are stored as XML files. You can read more about the UI layouts in the android documentation.

/res/Values

This folder again contains XML files, which contain key values pairs that will be referenced in the application. These XML files declare Arrays, colors, dimensions, strings etc. The main idea of having these values in a separate XML file is that the values can be used based on the locale without actually changing the source code. For example the messages in the application can be in different languages based on the use locale.

/assets

This folder also contains external resources used in the application like the /res folder. But the main difference is that the resources are stored in raw format and can be read only programmatically.

AndroidManifest.xml

This is an XML file which contains meta information about the android application and is important file for every android application project. It contains information about various activities, views, services etc. It also contains the list of user permissions that are needed to run the android application.

That explains the project structure of the android application. You can read more about it in the android documentation.

BTW how is your homework coming along? Hope you all were able to finish it quickly. I will be posting the source code for the homework together with the explanation soon. So stay tuned.

Update: I have also completed the homework for this session and have posted my source code and explanation.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• Free online course on developing android applications using Java (Feb 2, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)

Right now I have uploaded the theme to my github page and you can find more information about using it from the theme’s homepage.

I have to clean up the files a bit more before I could upload them to the WordPress official theme directory. Till then you may have to download it from the theme’s homepage.

Features

The following are the some of the features of the theme

• Two columns
• Fluid width
• Custom top navigation
• Built-in support for social icons
• Widgetized sidebar
• Widgetized footer
• Easy integration with couple of Plugins

Licence

The theme is released under GPL. Feel free to use or modify it as long as you can keep the link back to this page in the footer. If you cannot place the link (for instance on internal projects) and would still like to use the theme, then contact me and we can see what can be done.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below or contact me.

Possibly Related posts

• Blog redesign (Jul 9, 2006)
• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs) (Jan 2, 2008)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Jan 1, 2008)
• Year End Stats 0.3 (Dec 30, 2008)

My friend Jaskirat, asked me write about the session since he missed some parts of it as he slept during the session. Okay it was not because the session was boring, but due to the fact that 11 AM PST is midnight of us guys in India. I happily obliged and here are my notes from the session.

Introduction

The training started off with a brief introduction about the format of the session, about CreativeTech trainings, partnership with O’Reilly, brief profile of the author etc. They also explained how to use the GoTo Webinar console, ask questions etc.

Then there was a brief introduction about the android platform, its stack and how various components fit it. He also explained the various verbs like activity, intent etc. You can read about them in the Application fundamentals section of the android documentation.

Choosing the SDK version

Next there was a brief explanation about the SDK and the difference between android SDK and Google API’s and also about the various versions of SDK. This led to a brief Q&A session where people asked which version to SDK to target. The instructor then recommended targeting for SDK version 1.5. He said that version 1.5 strikes a balance between market reach and available features.

You can checkout the different versions of SDK and their market share in the android developer page.

Installing necessary software

After the Q&A, the instructor showed how to install the necessary software to follow the code samples.

You need to install the following

• Eclipse
• Android SDK
• ADT Eclipse Plugin

You can follow the instructions in the android documentation page to install the above softwares.

After installing the necessary software, you should also create an Android Virtual Device (AVD), which will allow you to run the application in the Android Emulator.

Demo Application

The goal of the session was to introduce the android platform and to write a demo flashlight app.

The app will have two views (red and green, see screenshot), which can be toggled by clicking a button. The following are the screenshots of the application.

Implementing the demo application

This was the meat of the presentation (but was pretty short due to time constraints), where he explained how to start writing code, to implement the demo application.

You can follow the steps in the “Hello World” tutorial of the android documentation to setup the project.

Source code

I have uploaded source code for yesterday’s session in github and you can download it from there.

The first session was really very good and I will be attending the remaining 5 sessions too and if possible will write blog posts with the notes that I take. Meanwhile if you are interested in developing android applications, then you should really watch this tutorial.

Update: I have added additional information about the android project structure in a subsequent post.

Update 2: I have also completed the homework for this session and have posted my source code and explanation.

Update 3: You can also view my notes for the next session.

You can also subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter to receive updates about my notes for the next sessions.

Possibly Related posts

• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 1 – My Notes (Feb 18, 2010)
• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• The structure of an Android project (Feb 12, 2010)
• Free online course on developing android applications using Java (Feb 2, 2010)

Thanks guys for all the scraps, wall postings, emails, tweets, phone calls and SMSes. You all really made it my day today.

So like all these years, I am going to eagerly wait to face the surprises which life is planning to throw at my way.

Possibly Related posts

• Turning 26 today (Feb 3, 2009)
• Turning 25 today, Happy Birthday to me (Feb 3, 2008)
• Happy Birthday, to me (Feb 3, 2006)
• Happy Birthday, WordPress (May 27, 2008)
• Happy Birthday, AJAX (Feb 19, 2006)

This free 6-week online course will get you started developing Android Applications with Java. You’ll learn hands on how to build actual working apps with Eclipse and the Android SDK, as well as the ins and outs of Android’s features

This online course if free if you watch it live, otherwise you may have to purchase it. You can check out the schedule in the official course page.

I check out the agenda and it seems to cover most of the basic things that you need to learn to develop applications using the Android platform. If you are interested then you register for the course at the official course page.

Possibly Related posts

• Using preference API in Android applications (Feb 23, 2010)
• Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications (Mar 2, 2010)
• The structure of an Android project (Feb 12, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 3 – My notes (Mar 3, 2010)
• Developing Android applications in Java – Session 2 – My notes (Feb 25, 2010)

I know I am famous but was humbled to know that even Facebook knows about it.

Possibly Related posts

• My Own Google Page (Aug 29, 2005)
• I am tagged (Mar 7, 2006)
• How best Linux compared with windows (Mar 1, 2007)
• Facebook Developer Contest – India (Jul 10, 2009)
• Error in error message! (Apr 10, 2007)

Okay, we have seen various tutorials, blog posts etc about using WordPress as this, WordPress as that and even a definite guide to using WordPress as a CMS

What I am going to talk about is how we can use WordPress as a platform to develop PHP applications on top of it.

There are basically two ways in which we can write apps using WordPress.

• As a Plugin or a Theme
• As a standalone app

As a Plugin or a Theme

This is the most common way of writing apps using WordPress. You basically write a Plugin or a Theme that uses WordPress API. (This is how RoloPress is developed)

Check out the slide for some examples apps using this technique.

As a standalone app

In this technique, we can make use of our knowledge about WordPress functions and API in our non-standard WordPress PHP-based web applications. The easiest way to use this technique is to use BackPress.

BackPress

So what is BackPress. Here is the official definition

BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.

Using BackPress, you can include the necessary files and you will get the WordPress utility functions. My most favourites are the security functions. In additions to using the utility functions, you will also be able to get the following features.

• User role management
• Complete Plugin API
• XML-RPC Server and Client
• Object Caching
• Database Abstraction
• Pseudo-cron functionality
• Full HTTP library
• KSES: Full security filtering for HTML content

You can see the full list in the BackPress documentation.

I also go about discussing the scenarios where it is advantages and where it is not so advantages to use BackPress. (You can see those in the slides)

So in a nutshell, if you are a WordPress developer and want to use the familiar WordPress functions in a non-WordPress PHP-based web application that you are developing, then you can use BackPress to get those familiar functions.

I am going to use BackPress in a couple of projects, which I am going to start and so stay tuned.

Possibly Related posts

• RoloPress – WordPress based contact manager (Nov 19, 2009)
• PHP 4, WordPress 2.5 and BBPress 0.9 (Dec 1, 2008)
• [Poll] – RoloPress Importer (Jan 20, 2010)
• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs) (Jan 2, 2008)

Now the wait is over, the actual merge process has started and this is going to be really exciting.

This will also mean that we will be able to run BuddyPress on single user WordPress installations, which is kind of cool. Eagerly waiting for WordPress 3.0

Possibly Related posts

• WordPress MU and BuddyPress Plugin competition – 2009 (Sep 29, 2009)
• WordPress and WordPress MU are going to be merged (May 31, 2009)
• BuddyPress for Single user WordPress installs – Confirmed (Feb 8, 2009)
• Log every email send through WordPress (Oct 8, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)

I want you to help me to choose which importer I should work on first, which will be released in for the next version of RoloPress.

So please cast your vote and we will work on the importer which receives the most number of votes.

(You can cast your vote here directly, if you are not able to see the poll widget or if you are reading this post from a feed reader)

Thanks

Possibly Related posts

• Using WordPress as a platform (Jan 30, 2010)
• RoloPress 1.1 (Jan 14, 2010)
• RoloPress – WordPress based contact manager (Nov 19, 2009)
• Look back – 2009 (Jan 18, 2010)

Highlights of 2009

2009 has been a year of rollercoaster for me and a year full of changes both at the personal side as well as professional side.

I started the year with a trip to the operation theatre and then to Bangalore for attending Yahoo hack day, started having a crush on Google Wave, then changed job and moved to Bangalore and then changed my host , participated in WordPress Plugin competition and then released a couple of Plugins (for which I got an excellent review from Ozh), and then had a break-up with TV (which turned out to be a very good thing) and then visited US on a business trip and then finally ended the year, by releasing RoloPress.

Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats.

Number of Posts

Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results

Number of comments

More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded.

Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face.

Average number of characters in posts

There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.

Total number of characters in all posts

I have almost written (okay typed ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too.

What’s in for this year?

So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out

<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>

Possibly Related posts

• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• [Poll] – RoloPress Importer (Jan 20, 2010)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs) (Jan 2, 2008)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Jan 1, 2008)
• Year End Stats 0.3 (Dec 30, 2008)

Now the first maintenance release (version 1.1) has been released with a couple of bug fixes and some enhancements. You can read the full list of changes in the announcement post.

You can download the latest version from the homepage and if you are interested, you can check out the source code at github.

Try it out and if you have any feedback, please post it here or in the forums.

Possibly Related posts

• [Poll] – RoloPress Importer (Jan 20, 2010)
• Using WordPress as a platform (Jan 30, 2010)
• RoloPress – WordPress based contact manager (Nov 19, 2009)
• Look back – 2009 (Jan 18, 2010)

Whomever I met after my visit, asked me the same question. How was my experience out there? So instead of explaining to each of them separately, I am going to point this blog post to them.

I am not going to get into the cultural/lifestyle or economical aspect at all, instead I am going to just describe the subtle things which you will notice in your everyday life.

Right hand driving

The first thing that got my attention after getting down at SFO airport is that people drive in the right side of the road. Even though I know about it before, it took me quite some time to get used to it (especially while taking turns)

No metric system

The second thing which I noticed was that the metric system (km, kg, litre, Celsius etc) is not used. Instead they use the British system (miles, pounds, gallons, Fahrenheit etc). I was always trying to do the conversion internally when doing calculations.

No ground floor in elevators

This one was a real surprise. After landing in my hotel, I realized that the elevators don’t have ground floor. So the ground floor becomes first floor and the first floor becomes second floor. Luckily I went in the elevator the first time instead of taking the steps. Otherwise I would have reached 4^th floor instead of 3^rd floor.

More automation

I was not sure whether it was because of shortage of manual labour or for cost-cutting. Most of the places like shops, petrol (okay okay gas) stations, super markets etc were automated. Vending machines have replaced manual labour in all these places.

Access for everyone

This one was really a good thing. In almost all places, there were separate accessible paths/doors for disabled people. Every parking lot had separate places for disabled people.

On the whole, experienced a lot of new things in my 3 weeks stay and have taken some tons of photos. Keep an eye on my flickr page; I will be uploading them soon after doing some post processing.

PS: Wish you all a happy and prosperous 2010.

Possibly Related posts

• Travelling to US (Nov 28, 2009)
• Yahoo Pipes Team writes about pipesCamp (Jan 5, 2008)
• Yahoo Open Hack day 2009 (Feb 5, 2009)
• Yahoo has got its Majo back (Dec 19, 2005)
• Why no AJAX? (Mar 9, 2006)

I am leaving to Sunnyvale CA tomorrow morning for a business trip and will be back just before Christmas. Since it is a business trip, I would be busy during the weekdays and should be free only during the weekends. I haven’t made any plans for the weekends yet, but let’s see how things turn out to be.

This is my first international travel and I am pretty excited about it. Got any tips for the first time traveller?

Possibly Related posts

• US through my eyes (Dec 31, 2009)
• Yahoo Pipes Team writes about pipesCamp (Jan 5, 2008)
• Yahoo Open Hack day 2009 (Feb 5, 2009)
• Yahoo has got its Majo back (Dec 19, 2005)
• Why no AJAX? (Mar 9, 2006)

Disclaimer: I just received a free copy of the ebook (in pdf format) for review. There was no condition that the review should be only positive and also I didn’t receive any payment for the review. So I am just writing what I felt about the book after reading it.

About the author

As most of you would know the book’s author Vladimir Prelovac is a popular WordPress Plugin author who does WordPress development as a full time job. He is the “Been there, done that” kind of guy for anything related to WordPress (themes, Plugins, security etc.) and we can be sure that he knows what he is talking about (which is evident from the book).

About the book

The book consists of 8 chapters in which the author dissects and discusses about 6 of his Plugins explaining the code and concept behind them. The first chapter is a general introduction and in the eighth chapter he discusses about post-development activities for the Plugin like generating pot files, generating readme files, deploying etc.

Each Plugin (chapter) deals with different aspect of WordPress Plugin development like social bookmarking, using JavaScript and AJAX in Plugin, Widgets, shortcode API, custom templates, extending TinyMCE, custom post types etc.

Positives about the book

As Ozh says, this book is great for beginners who want to get their hands dirty and quickly learn the concepts behind WordPress Plugins. It can quickly put you on track and from where you can easily be on your own. (Even I wish I had something like this 4-5 years ago when I initially started with WordPress Plugin development)

In each chapter, the author gives a brief explanation about the Plugin and then gradually converts it into code. After each code listing he explains what the code does and how it does it, which would be very useful to grasp the fundamental concepts behind WordPress Plugin development.

Things which are not too good (for me)

The major thing which caught my attention was that, the book is slightly outdated in certain places. It doesn’t mean that the code in the book will not work, but what I mean is that there are certain new and better ways to do things. For instance, using old methods to parse RSS Feeds, having hardcoded paths to wp-content and wp-config.php file etc. Even some of the screenshots are pre 2.7

I wouldn’t blame the author or the publisher for it, because this is bound to happen to any technical book. But I would be really happy if there could be a v2.0 of the book with these changes.

The other thing which I didn’t like about the book is that most of the code samples doesn’t follow WordPress coding standard (especially camelcase function names). This is just a matter of personal preference but I would have loved if the author followed the recommended coding standards, since this book is meant for beginners.

Final Verdict

So my final verdict is that if you are a beginner or Intermediate WordPress Plugin developer then this book is a must have. It will easily get you on track.

Links

• Book home page
• Author home page
• Ozh’s review of the book

Possibly Related posts

• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs) (Jan 2, 2008)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Jan 1, 2008)
• Year End Stats 0.3 (Dec 30, 2008)
• WpRecipes Contest (Apr 28, 2009)

RoloPress

The secret project was RoloPress, a WordPress based, open source contact manager, which I was developing with my friend Steve Bruner. The main distinction of RoloPress is that it is an application build on top of WordPress and is not a separate application with is tied up with WordPress.

Features

Some of the notable features of RoloPress for end users are:

• All admin tasks can be performed from front-end itself. You don’t need to visit the admin area.
• Ability to add/edit contacts
• Ability to add/edit companies
• Ability to add/edit notes about contacts or companies
• Has lot of readymade widgets (around 8 in the initial release)

Developer features

RoloPress follows WordPress Plugin architecture and provides lot of features for developers to play around.

• Highly extendable API
• Lot of custom hooks and filters
• Look and feel can be easily modified by creating child themes
• Most of the existing WordPress Plugins will work out of the box
• Easy to extend (If you know how to write a WordPress Plugin then you can easily write Plugins for RoloPress)

Release

The initial plan was to show the preview in WordCamp NYC (Now you know why I was interested in WordCamp NYC ) and release it on 16-Nov-2009. But during the preview session, Matt (founder of WordPress) gave some interesting feedback and we are working on them now. Unfortunately these changes are not backward compatible and so we have held back the release till those changed are incorporated. So you have to wait for sometime

For those who can’t wait, here is a presentation about RoloPress which was used in the preview session in WordCamp NYC.

Possibly Related posts

• Using WordPress as a platform (Jan 30, 2010)
• Plugin to display WordCamp NYC Badge (Oct 19, 2009)
• [Poll] – RoloPress Importer (Jan 20, 2010)
• Year End Stats for 2008 (Feb 26, 2009)
• Year End Stats for 2007 (Graphs) (Jan 2, 2008)

Got around 20 Google Wave invites to share and if you want one, then send me your email address either by sending an email, or by posting a comment below or by sending a DM in Twitter (BTW I am sudarmuthu in Twitter), or by snail mail or by sending the note in a dove or by whichever way that is faster.

Will send them on first come first served basics and off course you can bribe me

While you are waiting for your invite (or if you already got access), you can also checkout my other posts regarding Google wave.

• Google Wave – First Impressions
• Summary of Google Wave Introduction video
• Google Wave Related videos

Update:

For all those who left a comment below, I have invited you. But it seems that the invites are not sent in real time. This is the response from Google. So I guess, you might have to wait for sometime, before waving

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.Happy waving!"

Update 2:

Sorry guys, I have run out of invites. Will let you know if I get some.

A request for those who got invites from me. I would really appreciate if you could spare some of your invites for those who have commented.

Possibly Related posts

• Yahoo 360 Invites available (Jun 11, 2005)
• Summary of Google Wave Keynote video (Jun 4, 2009)
• Google Wave related videos (Jun 6, 2009)
• Google Wave – First Impressions (Jul 27, 2009)
• Gmail Invites (Mar 15, 2005)