Irish Android

These  slides are from Paul Irish. I thought I knew quite a few front end tools (maybe too many), but this  uncovered a heap more. It took me about 2 hours to watch the associated video and take a brief look at each some of the technologies mentioned. The vid is just over 30 minutes long, so info rich.

If you find yourself typing a lot of angle brackets in a text editor as you manually create html, then Zen Coding is a big help. All the details are here . I have the plugin working on eclipse now and it really speeds things up. Type div#content and hit tab and the text is replaced with <div id="content"></div> Obviously a trivial example, but there are many more speedups made possible with this. There is a handy cheat sheet (well 7 sheets) of hints here . Looking forward to getting proficient at this so that I can speed up my normal daily editing. There are plugins for a load of editors besides eclipse. A note for eclipse users: the stated shortcut of ctrl+E does not work out of the box. This is because tab is in its place (handier it is too). I discovered this even after unbinding switch editor (which is also ctrl+E). Zen coding is just one of the handy hints I got from watching this video from Paul Irish. http://paulirish.com/2012/talk-tooling-the-we...

I updated my cygwin (specifically my bash shell) to a 4.something version. CTRL-C did not work anymore. This was a pain as I kept having to kill the cygwin window with the close window x. Was not able to effectively use history and stuff. I 'updated' by cygwin by installing setup.exe again. I filtered the install down to bash so I could find the shell and then clicked on it a few times until is showed version 3.something. This now supports ctrl-c and has retained all my nice history stuff from before. The font is a bit small, but I am sure I can remedy that. Less important than ctrl-c to me.

The Notepad tutorial uses sqlite to store the users entered notes. This is a single table, so this method query(String table, String[] columns, String selection, String[] selectionArgs, String groupBy, String having, String orderBy)  was fine. It takes a single table name and some params for the other clauses. To use more than one table I used the rawQuery(String sql, String[] selectionArgs) method. This takes arbitrary sql (union in my case) along with values to bind to any ? that you used. I have removed the SQLiteOpenHelper from the code also. This opens and creates your database and handles upgrading the database following schema changes. Overall I found this cumbersome and have switched to moving the database file from the device (emulator) to my pc. I then query it using SQLite 2009 Pro. I got it here . Excellent query analyzer type tool. I make my changes here (schema and data) and then push this back to the device when I am ready to test with the app. The pushing is...

One of the ways of persisting data with Android is to use a SQLite database. A fuller list of methods is given here . When you are persisting data in any application one of the things you will want to do is write ad hoc queries to see is you data getting to the database, how big are your tables etc. SQLLite lets you do this with the databases that your applications use in the emulator. You will need to connect to the emulator using the Android Debug Bridge (adb). Type this at a command prompt (you obviously need to have adb.exe on your path, or just open a command prompt in the tools directory of your android installation - \android-sdk-windows\tools in my case): adb -s emulator-5554 shell The name of your emulator may be different, you can check the name in the console of eclipse when you are launching an app to run on the emulator. Once you have run that you will need to use the sqlite3 command to mount the database you are interested in. Enter this at the shell prompt which...