Archive for category My Freeware

Android Image Processing

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Coding, Image Processing, My Freeware on March 31st, 2010

If you are thinking of doing some image processing on Android, you might like to take a look at Michael Wells  report (pdf) on image processing on Android. It benchmarks some common image processing functions (sobel, addition, convolution and threshold) and provides some sample code.

It shows that’s it’s possible to do simple image processing under Java without resorting to using the NDK.

mBaselineAlignedChildIndex out of bounds

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Coding, My Freeware on March 12th, 2010

One of the great things about programming Android as opposed to particularly Symbian and Windows Mobile is the fact that you get very few occasions where you code something and you get a run time error that doesn’t help you at all and points to something unrelated. Symbian is particularly bad for this and you can spend a long time scratching your head and changing things until you figure out what’s really wrong.

I came  across a rare instance in Android today where an error didn’t really help me. I had created a complex screen programatically (as opposed to in XML) and was getting the error…

"java.lang.RuntimeException: mBaselineAlignedChildIndex of LinearLayout set to an index that is out of bounds"

If you ever get this it actually means that you have created a LinearLayout with no children.

Fixing Speaker Buzz and Emulator Crash

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Coding, Eclipse, Getting Started, How to, My Freeware, Tools on February 22nd, 2010

Unfortunately, the Android emulator doesn’t always work well with desktop sound. This can cause the desktop speakers to start buzzing just after boot. The emulator also crashes and it’s not possible to close it.

The solution is to turn off sound support in the emulator. You can do this by adding -noaudio to the emulator command line. Open Run Configurations and select the Target tab. Add -noaudio to the ‘Additional Emulator Command Line Options’…

targetnoaudioObviously, you won’t be able to hear or test sound if you use this option.

Android Market Fragmentation

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Android Market, Linux, My Freeware, phones on April 22nd, 2009

pocketgamerbizPocketGamer.biz has an article on ‘What’s wrong with Android Market’. There are lots of criticisms of the Market many of which I have also expressed here and on MobilePhoneDevelopment.com. However, there’s one new piece of information at the end that I found interesting…

“At least one major carrier is specifying their Android devices to come without the Android store”

This ties in with my previous thoughts that some Android phones might not come with a full set of Google applications.

Presumably a carrier not using the Android Market would implement their own application store. From the carrier standpoint, I can see the sense of this in terms of controlling what’s on their store, app certification, the commission structure, payment mechanisms and ultimately perhaps what the users can install on their Android phone. However, I can see consumer confusion as to why they can’t get particular applications on their phone. There’s also likely to be general developer disillusionment that they can’t easy publish their application to all Android users.

Deep Inside Android

Posted by Simon Judge, Freelance Mobile Developer in Android, Events, Getting Started, Linux, My Freeware on March 26th, 2009

I came across some useful slides recently. They are entitled ‘Deep Inside Android‘ from a presentation by Esmertec, an OHA member, at the OpenExpo 2008.

esmertecandroid
The presentation is useful for people who want to learn a bit more about Android Linux internals. The later slides also cover Android programming essentials.