Offline functionality is a no brainer (and how Twitter dropped the ball)
This is Part 2 of 3 in a series on Offline Connectivity. Read Part 1: No Connection? Big Problem...
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Category: Android
Static Application Reference
I’m a bit of a stickler for passing Context around methods rather than keeping a handle on the context in object fields and whatnot. There are some obvious reasons, like being careful about memory leaks and whatnot. I feel...
Read MoreApp Data Encryption
We’re working on an app that requires local data to be encrypted. Till now, the solution has been using the username/password combo to be the ultimate source of the encryption key (I’ll spare you the process of going from u/p...
Read MoreData Synchronization
I haven’t been blogging much. I suffer from what we’ve termed the “Great American Post Syndrome” (GAPS). That is, every blog post needs to be the best piece of technical literature ever written, so you actually never post...
Read MoreAnnouncing Wejit!
This is a rough draft post. Will update in a bit, but wanted to get this out asap… Today we’re putting Wejit into public beta. What’s a Wejit? A Wejit is a widget you can put on your Android phone’s home screen. Pictures go...
Read MoreOffline Sync Queue (aka. Superbus)
Quick Note: To avoid name confusion, the project is called “Superbus”. This was intended to be a placeholder name, but has stuck for a bit. When we get a new one, we’ll update. Find the project...
Read MoreOffline Syncing
I will prep this post by saying the obvious to anybody who’s had to do it. Offline operation with data syncing is difficult. By order of difficulty, apps and data generally go like this: 1) Offline only. No server...
Read MoreTraining: SQLite
A little intro. The path of Android feels a lot like the path of web, rolled back about 10 years. When the web first rolled up, databases were weird, clunky, proprietary, and expensive. Most web apps would try to use files,...
Read MoreTaking a pic without the SD card
It seems like people seriously freak out when you want SD card access. I’m not 100% sure what’s up with that, but I’ve seen a whole lot of 1 star reviews for nothing more than requesting SD card access. Generally, the big thing...
Read MoreAndroid Testing
Gave a little talk last night on Android Testing. Slides here. Not too useful out of context, but you might pick up a tidbit or two.
Read MoreBasic Android Testing
I wouldn’t really call this a “blog post” as much as a quick set of instructions for basic testing. I need to share them with somebody, so why not everybody? Goals If you’re testing an app, how do you get the developer the info...
Read MoreAndroid Sync Bus
On several projects we’ve needed the ability to sync stuff offline. We’ve tried a number of approaches, and eventually wound up building a call bus service.
The basic idea behind the sync call bus is you post a command to the service, it adds it to a queue, and attempts to process the command. The bus keeps commands in order, processes them one at a time, and will persist the command to be run later if the system can’t handle the command now, generally because you don’t have a network connection.
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