Mobile

Most of us were riveted by events in Boston recently. I’m referring, of course, to the deadly blasts at the Boston Marathon, which were followed a few days later by the all-consuming man hunt that left one of the suspects dead and the other in custody. I especially appreciated seeing so many people in Watertown, Massachusetts – the area that had been locked down the entire day of the successful man hunt – cheer as triumph law enforcement officers drove… Read More

In all applications, there are those exceptions, those bugs that no one expected.  Try as we might  to think of every conceivable error, exception, or issue, we developers miss some things.  When this happens on a device “out in the wild” – meaning on a device in the hands of the mobile users – we often don’t know it happened, let alone be able to better deal with the problem in the future. Catching the Unexpected – using the UncaughtExceptionHandler… Read More

All Android developers know and utilize the Android developer Web site – namely developer.android.com. In particular, the API Guides and Reference (a.k.a. Android Javadocs) are well known and heavily used portions of that Web site.  Did you know, however, that these documents can be downloaded and used on your local development machine?  When disconnected from the Web and designing/developing Android code, this can be quite handy.  How do you get them locally? Download the SDK If you don’t already have… Read More

“Applications” in Android are .apk files that hold a collection of loosely coupled components.  Rarely do components have direct communication with each other.  Instead, Intents are often used to trigger these components to start.  Components like Activities and Services also have a lifecycle which is heavily controlled by Android.  Meaning the components may exist one moment and be gone the next depending on what the user is doing (hitting a Back button) and what resources (like memory) Android has available… Read More

beginnerTomorrow, I and fellow instructor Jason Shapiro will be speaking at Mobile March 2013.  I believe the conference is a sell out, but if you are attending, I hope you will join us for our talks.  Jason will be speaking at 10:45am on iPhone Core Data.  I am speaking at 3:15pm on Robotium (the Android test framework). Intertech is a Silver Sponsor of the event and I know we’ll have people there to provide you information about Intertech training and… Read More

Objective-C is an object oriented programming language that is built on top of C. This means both C and Objective-C syntax are used when creating iOS apps. C gives us many built in data types, functions, structs, enumerated data types, and more. Objective-C gives us Classes, Objects, Protocols, Properties, and more. Objective-C was created around 1983 by Brad Cox and Tom Love. The original idea was to add Smalltalk-80 functionality to C. Whereas C was limited to data-only structures and… Read More

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This is the second post of a two part series of posts dealing with saving and retrieving Android instance state.  In the last post (see here), I explained how onSaveInstanceState( ) / onRestoreInstanceState( ) methods and the Android Bundle object can be used to save and restore instance state from an activity.  In this post, I show you how to use the setRetainInstance( ) method to allow a fragments to retain state. Fragments Fragments were introduced to the Android UI… Read More

This begins a two part blog posting dedicated to explaining and exemplifying how Android (activity/fragment) state can be saved and restored.  In this first part, I provide information about the use of onSaveInstanceState( ) and onRestoreInstanceState( ) methods of the activity for saving and restoring state.  In Part 2 of this series (my next post), I will take you through an explanation of a fragment’s setRetainInstance( ) and getRetainInstance( ) methods for managing state.  The setRetainInstance( ) and getRetainInstance( )… Read More