Android

If you're struggling to decide which phone to get, then you're in a similar predicament that I was in not too long ago - the difference being, that I actually got to play around with each of these phones for a bit before actually deciding to stick with one.

Since the Samsung Galaxy S came out a few days before the iPhone 4, I decided to get it just to satisfy my gadget hunger. After playing around with the Galaxy S, I was quite impressed - the interface was real smooth, and transitioning through the different menues (desktops) was speedy - this is in comparison to my not so old old phone, the Nexus One.

One majorly annoying issue that I stumbled upon, was the fact that I couldn't send multiple attachments using Intents to the Google Mail app. The quickest way around that was of course to compress all of the files into one (ZIP).

After searching around online, I didn't really find much on zipping files on your Android device - most of the articles were for standard java applications, which assumed that all your files were in the current directory that you wanted to zip.

So, I used what I could and whipped up my own wrapper class that allows you to easily zip files in Android!

After procrastinating for so long, I finally got off my arse and released the Model Release Pal for Android - beta.

As an amateur photographer myself, I believe that this will an invaluable tool.

I've also decided to release it for free, as it's still in the beta phase and still not 100% sure if I want to charge for it in the future.

I wanted to give a quick comparison of the specs on these phones, mainly because they interest me the most.

The thing that they all have in common, which obviously makes them great to begin with, is the fact that they all use the Android OS :)

Anyways, lets get down to the specs - I've placed them in a table format, for ease of reading and comparison.

Have you seen other applications with Buttons (or other views, but mainly Buttons) that stay in one spot, even if you're scrolling through a list? These are commonly known as floating Buttons or Views.

This is actually used a lot on websites as well, and they may seem hard to produce at first glance, but it's actual quite easy.

I'll run you through an easy application that uses one floating button within a ListActivity, which is aligned to the bottom right of the screen - on top of the ListView.

This is a subject that's seldom talked about, but can be quite important. The NDK basically allows you to port any native C/C++ code/libraries into your Android project, using JNI (Java Native Interface).

I'm going to go through a quick and simple example of how you can display "Hello World" in your Android application using some native C.

A very annoying issue that I've noticed with the NBAndroid Netbeans plugin, is that it doesn't know how to properly attach an external JAR file to an Android Project.

If you right-click on libraries (under your project folder), and click on 'Add JAR/Folder', it will add a reference to that library/JAR file, which it will recognize in the code (detect all the classes, etc). The problem lies when you try to compile the project - at that point, it doesn't actually add the JAR to the project, which in turn gives you errors when running.

I'm happy to announce that my Allergy Pal application has finally been released!

This should be very useful for people suffering with allergies, and need a way to convey this to others - especially in other languages!

The Android SDK makes it very easy to send emails from an application, but unfortunately, that's only if you want to send them via the built-in mailing app. For most situations this works fine, but if you want to send something out and don't want any input/intervention from the user, it's not as easy.

In this article I'm going to show you how to send an email in the background without the user even knowing - the application will do everything behind the scenes.

The process for capturing, saving and displaying an image in Android can be quite annoying, especially if you want it to work across all devices.

With the release of the Sense UI (an HTC creation), it's made things 1 step more difficult. So, the reason I'm writing this article is because I've been stuck on this same issue for quite awhile, and there isn't enough information out there to let us know why it simply won't work.

Simply put, the Sense UI handles things differently when it comes to saving a new image after an intent was called (ie. new Intent(MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE)). In this article I'll show you how I overcame this problem and walk you through my code.

Have you been trying to find a quick and easy way to format dates from a String? It can be quite tricky with Java (if you're new to it). So, I'm going to go through a few very simple steps to accomplish just that.

The Android market has been lacking in SEO applications (in comparison to the iPhone), but in the recent months, it really caught up. It doesn't have the same caliber of SEO apps, but at least it has a decent selection.

In this article, I'm going to run through each of the current Android SEO apps, and give a quick summary (and yes, I have tried them all).

This was the first and only app that I developed for the iPhone, in the hopes that I could get a better understanding of iPhone application development.

Why would I choose to do an app that retrieves the Google PageRank & Alexa Ranking? Well... why not? It's not like I was looking to make money out of it - I just wanted to develop something that allowed me to improve my iPhone SDK/Objective C/Cocoa skill base.