Nerd Circus

Hiveminder 0.2

Announcing my newest Android app: Hiveminder Braindump!

I’ve been using the hiveminder todo list service for a while now, and my biggest problem was getting stuff on to my todo list. Things would come up while i was out wandering the streets, and they always slipped my mind before i could get to a computer to enter them into hiveminder. But no more!

This little app allows you to jot down those pesky todo items that come up while you’re on the go, and send them off to Hiveminder instantly! (actual speeds may vary).

Since actually crossing things off my todo list is not really my goal, the interface for viewing your list, and completing tasks is not functional. There is, however, a quick link from the options menu that will take you to the Hiveminder mobile site. For folks with Hiveminder Pro subscriptions, it also supports SSL connections (see the Preferences item in the options menu).

Klaxon 0.8

New klaxon just went up in the Android Market, v0.8.

Fixes include:
* options menu in ListView no longer crashes the app!
* a variety of cupcake fixes, including working “page status” indicators
* slight delay in initial notification sound ( so its not cut off by the regular text noise)
* a whole bunch more that i dont recall.

enjoy!

on tiny notebooks

a friend of mine has been kind enough to loan me an asus eee pc that he was not using. I’m currently piloting the idea of getting a netbook for a more mobile computing lifestyle. So far, im not terribly impressed.

The obvious difficulty is, of course, the tiny keyboard. I dont have the smallest hands, but the more time i give it, the better i seem to be getting at typing “normally” (its been about 2h at this point). im still making reasonably frequent fat-fingerings, but i am hopeful that it will improve.

Intially, i was hit by the ubuntu intel video driver issue, but i was able to work around that by using gconf-editor to set /apps/netbook-launcher/force_low_graphics to true, eliminating the use of fancy animations in netbook launcher.

i’m still undecided, but i think theres some value to this whole netbook thing. especially for folks who carry pagers, and need to be net accessible at a moment’s notice.

new Klaxon release looking for testers

After considerable updates for cupcake, i’ve just thrown up a new release of Klaxon at the following url: https://nerdcircus.org/Klaxon-v0.8.apk

valiant souls are welcome to test, and report bugs at http://code.google.com/p/klaxon/

for folks not interested in typing in urls, here’s a QR code you can use to get to the apk:

activities, handlers, and threads, oh my!

I’ve been wrestling with android’s “orientation change” behavior for over a week now, and i think i’m finally starting to understand *some* of it.

i recently found this article: http://www.ociweb.com/jnb/jnbJan2009.html

which does a pretty good job of explaining the issue. However, they opt for the typical java approach of interfaces and serializing. Such things are expensive, so i’m going to try the onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() approach.

My theory is that all the threads should be spawned from my “backend interface” object, which can be passed to the new Activity instance via getLastNonConfigurationInstance()

i’ll give it a shot, and see how it goes.