A new conference is in the local southwest USA – the Phoenix Mobile Festival. Check out the site here: http://phxmobifestival.com/ I’ll be speaking this Saturday at the conference on the topic of working with Android Fragments. If you’re in the area feel free to swing by and say hi. ...
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I’ve been using Roboletric for about a year now on a client project and we recently ran into an issue when we started testing a new screen. We use Roboguice for dependency injection and when the view would get created under test the views that would get injected at normal runtime would not get injected during test. All of a sudden the injected view would be null. The class looked like this: The were trying to inject the LinearLayout and it was not working. The view was always null. The view looked like this: Notice the “a” in the “xmlns:a=” in the view. We...
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I’m very concerned with maintaining a healthy lifestyle and one of the most important things you can do to stay in good healthy standing order is to drink a lot of water (especially if you live in Phoenix, like I do – where temps are regularly above 90 or 100) . In my quest to consume more water I’ve found that in order to do so I need to make it easier to do without risking spilling water all over my keyboard and/or laptop. Using a regular cup doesnt really work. I’m a klutz and tend to knock over cups quite easily. So in order to make sure I can drink water...
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Today I got a new Apple Airport Extreme router / base station. I have a Brother 2170w wireless printer (basically set it up, and you can print wirelessly all over your office or house or wherever). Its freaking great. I really think every office should have one of these lying around. Its simply awesome. Previously I had a Cisco router that I used, but it crapped out. However, setting it up with this router was easy. I followed the instructions and everything was golden. Not with the Airport Extreme … I could not get it set up. I followed ALL the manual instructions and read the quick...
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My background is in software development, not marketing, not sales, not real estate … its software development. Over the years I’ve been a full time employee, consultant and business owner and entrepreneur.  While the businesses I’ve started are not making gobs of cash like Yelp or Facebook, they definitely make my life a lot easier by generating recurring revenue streams. These types of businesses are usually referred to as lifestyle businesses. I’d agree that my businesses currently fall into that category, to a point. That point being that one day I’d like...
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This is a quick story about how I started my first company (a record label) after college, lived my dream, drained my life savings (and more) and eventually moved this into my memory bank as one of the funnest times I’ve ever had. The Story … Back in the early 2000′s I started a record label in Phoenix, AZ. Its name: Grave 9 Records. It was started late one night at the office I worked in with a friend of mine and a couple of friends that were in a band. When it first started I was the financing and talent management/distribution/etc and he was the other half of the...
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This is a simple post in which I’m going to show you how you can create a simple notification on top of an existing button that looks just like an iOS/OSX notification, as shown below: Concept I want to do this WITHOUT any 9 patch images whatsoever. If you look closely, you’ll see that the red notification is actually a gradient. The bottom red color is darker than the top. The reason I want to stay away from 9-patch is because its a painful to work with when you need to make changes. The icon you see above is going to be completely implemented in a XML drawable. This will allow...
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