In response for the Font Hipsters

Today I read the article “Font Hipsters” by Daring Fireball and have to comment on the last 3 sentences:

We criticize Android for being poorly designed because it’s poorly designed. We favor iOS because it’s better designed. That’s it.

My reaction is:

We criticize iOS for being totally controlled by Apple because you will need to jailbreak your device to run your own apps. We favor Android because it’s open. It’s you who controls your device.

Anyway, the article was actually about the new Android system font Roboto. Personally I really like the font.

Click here to download it.

Lessons which can be learned by playing Angry Birds

Playing angry birds is actually a lot of fun and besides being fun, without even realizing, we train ourselves in the daily business practices as:

Planning
Before you start playing the game, you look how the pigs are located and protected to determine the best strategy would be to beat the level as you should so do in real life: doing an inventory on the obstacles and the possibilities.

Efficiency
As you have limited birds with different abilities having their strengths and weaknesses, you have to be efficient with your resources to beat the level or as in business: get the job done with the resources you have.

Minimum effort, maximum output
The game gives you bonuses for the birds you have not used. By doing a good planning and by being efficient you can achieve the goal with the minimum effort.The game actually somehow forces you to be smart. Same applies in business.

Patience and Perseverance
As you progress in the game the levels get harder and mostly you will not succeed the first time you try. However by trying again and re-evaluating your tactic, you will succeed. By having patience and retrying each time you will be successful.

Experience
As you get more and more experienced the game becomes easier. You will start to see the patterns and develop tactics which you can use to achieve the goal. Your tactics will become more complex as you know how your resources act and even at some point be able to use your resources in a way you initially would not have thought of.

Luck factor
Sometimes you are just plain lucky. Your tactic did not work as you had thought but still you were able to achieve the goal. This is the same in business, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes not. Combined with experience you can even predict if you are going to be lucky and it can be even be integrated in your tactics with a backup plan if you were not lucky as expected.

I believe the success of Angry Birds is due to the fact that the game involves what we do daily (even some of us do without knowing) in a fun way.

Android development continued

Sometimes this Eclipse is killing me After I added a menu.xml, it kept giving strange errors like, XML cannot be parsed, size 0, bla bla. I double checked the xml and couldn’t find any problems. So maybe it could have been an Eclipse issue, so I restarted it.

After restarting Eclipse, this time I got the message:

Unparsed aapt error(s)! Check the console for output. <ProjectName> Unknown Android Packaging Problem.

Checking the console, revealed no errors What to do now. Again Google Fu learned me how to resolve this issue as follows:

Right-click on the error message in the Problems view, and deleting the error. Modify the xml for forcing a build and magically it worked.

Android development

After a long time not using Eclipse, I recently started it again to experiment further with Android development. 3 things came up, which I would like to share with you and what the fix is.

 

After creating a test Android project, the following error showed up:

ERROR: Unable to open class file <path>\gen\com\example\test\R.java: No such file or directory.

It seems that the java compiler cannot create this R.java. In order to fix this, do the following:

1. Open Eclipse
2. Open Window/Preferences
3. Expand JAVA option
4. Select Build Path
5. Check the option "Project" and uncheck "folder" options
6. Click on OK
7. Restart eclipse IDE

These steps fixed my problems regarding this issue.

 

 

When trying to run the application, the following error came up:

An internal error occurred during: "Launching test".com/android/ddmlib/ShellCommandUnresponsiveException

The fix for this was to update the Android DDMS by going to Help -> Software Updates select the Android DDMS and press Update button.

I had updated the Android Development tools, but had forgotten to update the Android DDMS.

 

 

Unable to view manifest files from within Eclipse, when you open the main.xml

When you try to open an application's manifest file from within Eclipse, you might get an error such as this one:

An error has occurred. See error log for more details.
org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.StructuredTextEditor.isBlockSelectionModeEnabled()Z

Try reverting to the 3.0 version of the Eclipse XML Editors and Tools. If this does not work, remove the 3.1 version of the tool. To do this in Eclipse 3.4:

1. Select Help > Software Updates...
2. Select the Installed Software tab.
3. Select Eclipse XML Editors and Tools.
4. Click Uninstall.
5. Click Finish.
6. When you restart Eclipse, you should be able to view the manifest files.

In my case, I just uninstalled them and it magically worked

 

Hope these were useful for you if you encounter the same issue.

Samsung Galaxy S Tips

I was just surfing and encountered some tips on the usage of the Samsung Galaxy S which will help me/you to get the most of this excellent phone.

1. Contact screen: Swipe to left to create a text/SMS message to the contact
2. Contact screen: Swipe to right to call the contact immediately
3. Contact screen: Move your finger in the alphabet to quickly navigate to a contact starting with the letter, then while pressing move to left to move within that letter, eg. after D you can navigate in everything starting with D by moving to the left
4. Press and hold HOME key to get a list of recently used apps, which can be used to switch between applications (not specific to SGS)
5. Press menu and Edit in the home screen to delete and/or reorder the home pages. In order to reorder: touch and hold the screen which will allow to drag them
6. If your brightness is not set to auto, you can swipe from left to right in the notification bar to set brightness to maximum and the right to left to set brightness to minimum.
7. You can have the SGS announce the title/artist of a song from the Music player by pressing and holding the Up Volume button while a song is playing
8. You can "lock screen" while watching video by pressing Power Button while a video is playing. This is great at preventing unintended clicks while holding the phone watching a video
9. In the browser: Access to the bookmark button and address bar by tapping the Menu button (no need to scroll all the way up)
10. Open soft D-Pad by tap-and-hold the "?123" key on the standard Samsung Keyboard or swipe from the Swype button to the SYM button in the Swype Keyboard
11. Pressing and holding the Power button (keep pressing it after you get the shutdown/airplane dialog) will perform a reset.
12. Holding the Menu key for a second, will bring up the search dialog (emulating the search button available in other Android phones)
13. You lock the camera screen to only take a shot, by pressing the Power button for a very short time. This will show a paddock on screen.
14. When receiving a call press the volume down button to mute the ringer
15. Use the volume +/- in camera mode to zoom in and out

For more technical tips see the also the XDA forum and see also a list of cool apps to use with the SGS.

Future of navigation: Augmented Navigation

For more information about augmented reality, see this presentation