20110614 Android’s activity stack and pressing HOME

I was having a huge issue with the application I’m working on. The idea is to have a MainActivity and a GameActivity; when you’re in MainActivity and click on a certain button, you get GameActivity. So far so good. The problem was that if I pressed HOME and then clicked again on the application launcher, [...]

20110420 Fixing Be There DSL issues… with a little bit of scripting

When we moved to our current DSL provider (Be There) we didn’t want to go through the pains of using the horrid provided modem, the BeBox. So we got a Netgear which has been working phenomenally well… until recently.

20110407 How to hide the camera preview in Android

It actually was something that intrigued me to no end. No tutorial that I’ve read explained how to do it; there were only vague (and incorrect) mentions to not setting PUSH_BUFFERS in the SurfaceHolder, but yet there were apps who were totally hiding the camera preview, such as the famous “spy camera” style apps (those [...]

20110405 Native startPreview failed on Nexus S? Check your preview size

I got several error reports for Nerdstalgia from people using Nexus S. They were something akin to this: 04-05 12:22:50.371: DEBUG/SEC_Overlay(102): overlay_createOverlay:IN w=176 h=144 format=99 04-05 12:22:50.375: DEBUG/SEC_Overlay(102): src width, height are changed [w= 176, h= 144]->[w=176, h= 144] 04-05 12:22:50.375: INFO/SEC_Overlay(102): Opened video1/fd=253/obj=006e2468/shm=251/size=4096 04-05 12:22:50.375: DEBUG/SEC_Overlay(102): dst width, height have changed [w= 16, h= [...]

20110317 The paid vs ad-supported apps experiment

A few days ago I exchanged a series of interesting e-mails with the mighty Gargaj from Conspiracy, scene.org and others. He asked me about my experience developing Android apps and what it was like with free vs paid apps, etc. It seems some of his friends in Hungary (where he lives) are considering starting with [...]