On a more serious note, I’ve been working with Android for a very less time, but “I’m lovin it!” So how did I get into Android development? I’m currently working with the good folks at Hibiscus Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (from January 2010 actually) and there, I got the opportunity to work with Palm WebOS, iPhone (didn’t do much – just a bit of learning) and finally Android.

In this post, I want to share with you a few thoughts on why I like Android (as a user and developer) and why I think that it has a lot of potential. So here we go…

It’s open source

Android, being an open source operating system built on Linux makes it possible for anybody to port it to any device from a mobile phone to __________ (fill the blank with your device). So what’s the advantage? The advantage is that as more and more devices implement the operating system, I as a developer can make applications that run on all these platforms without much work.

This raises an interesting question – “Why did Google implement it on a mobile phone first?” Read the answer as told by Andy Rubin (Vice president of Google mobile platforms) here.

Added to this, the Open Handset Alliance makes it all the more interesting.

The phone is awesome

I was able to get my hands on Google Nexus One and so far I don’t have any complaints with it. In fact, I love the interface and the simplicity of the design more than anything. Check out some videos on the YouTube channel to see for yourself.

Even from a developer point of view, I really love the OS because:

Again…open source

…which means that you have a huge community if you need help with anything.

An elaborate SDK

The development SDK of the phone is really big. That of course means a steeper learning curve to get acquainted with all the available features, but once the learning is done, you can do a lot of things.

Development in familiar technologies/languages

The development is done in Java. XML is also used mainly when designing UI and setting project configuration. So if you are a Java developer, it will be a cake walk for you. You get all the OOP goodness and all you need to understand is the OS architecture, and your way around the API. Google is your best friend when it comes to getting more info.

For me, the easiest to learn was definitely Palm WebOS owing to the small API and the fact that all you need to know to develop for the platform are HTML, CSS and Javascript. Since I have knowledge of these, it was easy. Android is a bit tough because of the big API and more elaborate development methods. iPhone is a completely different story because of the tools, language (Objective C) and of course the SDK’s availability on Windows (not available). So I couldn’t explore it much.

Flexibility

The SDK gives you, as a developer, a lot of flexibility as far as your design/development approach is concerned. For example, when designing a UI, you can do it using simple XML files or code a Java class. This gives you the freedom to define the UI in a way as required by your application.

It’s from Google

So I’m sure they’ll have a bunch of big ideas as to what they want to do with the OS. The Google phone is definitely just the beginning.

There are many more reasons why I like Android, but these are the most important ones that make me want to work with the platform for as long as I can.

So why did I post this?

Well, I realized that a lot of guys and gals out there are getting started with Android development and so I want to share whatever I’m learning on this blog. So I’ll write tutorials, how-to’s, tips and tricks (or whatever you like to call them) on various aspects of Android development. This post is a curtain raiser for the same and I’d love to hear from you, any ideas on the things like topics that I can cover, etc.

New to this template? Like what you saw? Check it out here.

The problem is that when you are uploading the application to a server, you might have to change all occurences of such code to put in a relative path. This is where I found detecting flash player type to be useful.  Below is the code:

if(Capabilities.playerType == "External")
{
	//do your stuff for local development
}else{
	//do your stuff for running the code when on a server
}

Happy coding!

Create a file in named “rename.php”. and put this code in the file:

<?php
if(!$_GET["directory"])
{
	$rootdir = ".";
}else{
	$rootdir = $_GET["directory"];
}

function renameFiles($dir){
	$fileList = scandir($dir) or die("Not a directory");

	foreach($fileList as $file){
		if(is_dir("$dir/$file") && $file != '.' && $file != '..')
		{
			renameFiles("$dir/$file");
		}
		if(is_file("$dir/$file"))
		{
			if(substr(basename("$dir/$file"), strlen(basename("$dir/$file")) - 3) == "JPG")
			{
				echo "$dir/$file" . "<br/>";
				rename("$dir/$file", "$dir/" . substr(basename("$dir/$file"),0, strlen(basename("$dir/$file")) - 4) . ".jpg");
			}
		}
	}

	return $xmlStr;
}
renameFiles($rootdir);
?>

Now upload this to your server. If you want to rename all the images in a folder named “images”, upload it to your root and open it as http://www.example.com/rename.php?directory=images.

Happy coding!

Starting a photography business? Want to have a website that can showcase your beautiful portfolio in an elegant fashion? Search no more and check this out!

With just $40, you can get started with your website in minutes. See the features below:

Features

Background slideshow

The template comes with a background slideshow component with the following features:

• It supports images and flv files
• Images are loaded from simple XML files
• Images are resized according to the stage dimensions
• Images are smoothed to achieve non-pixelated look when resized
• The XML offers you the following options
  • Slideshow interval
  • Alignment of the thumbnails on screen (right, left, top, bottom)
  • Alignment margin
  • Thumbnails scroll direction (horizontal, vertical)
  • Dimension of the thumbnail list (height if scrolling is vertical and width if scrolling is horizontal)
  • Number of rows/columns of thumbnails
  • Thumbnail width and height

The component is for sale here – XML Background Switcher V2.

Text slideshow

Use this module to display a text based slideshow. I’ve included it in the “HOME” section to display photography related quotes. You can use it to display recent news, links to specific galleries, etc. You can set the slideshow interval and the text to be displayed in XML .

Content pages

• HTML and CSS supported content pages in which you can load images, styled text, hyperlinks and much more.
• You can use the mouse and keyboard arrows to scroll the content.
• Press the HOME , END keys on your keyboard to scroll to the top and bottom of the content respectively

Galleries

• Very easy to use
• Supports single and multiple categories. See OBJECTS for multiple categories gallery and FLOWERS , ISOLATED for single category gallery
• Supports jpg, png, swf
• Zoom/pan options and controls
• Administer the following settings from XML
  • scale mode for the images – you can set it to either ‘fit’ or ‘fill’ the screen
  • Switch on/off zoom and mouse scroll of large images from XML
  • Dimensions of the gallery if you don’t want to have it fullscreen
  • Gap between menu items and thumbnail items
  • The background image that is displayed when the gallery first loads
  • The number of columns of the thumbnails that must be displayed
  • The images, their titles and descriptions
• Use the keyboard arrow keys to scroll the thumbs and also to go to previous/next images
• Press the “I” key on your keyboard to see the info related to the loaded images
• Press the “T” key on your keyboard to see the thumbnails list
• Press the “M” key on your keyboard to see the categories of the gallery
• Press the HOME , END keys on your keyboard to scroll to the top and bottom of the thumbnails list
• You can use the mouse and keyboard arrows to scroll the thumbnaiils list.

Password protected galleries

These galleries are password protected version of the galleries used in this template. You can use this section to give provide you clients with a means to review the work you did for them without allowing others to see it.

• Passwords are stored as MD5 hashes
• The XML files storing the client’s information is encrypted for further security
• You can choose to encrypt the XML files or not
• You can login with the following credentials
  • LOGIN : iceonflames, PASSWORD : flashden – multi categories gallery
  • LOGIN : john, PASSWORD : smith – single category gallery
• The client can submit a review of the work then and there once he logs into the client section. It reaches the site administrator as an email with the client details and the submitted review.

Note: The system I’ve implemented is very simple in terms of security, but manages to hide the client information effectively. I however do not guarantee the safety of the system and am not responsible for any damage (like people getting in without having access credentials, though it is actually pretty difficult if you follow the right measueres. I’ve outlined more secure measures in the help file). If you are looking for a very secure system, then you must consider using databases(which is not provided with the template) in conjunction with the login module of this template. You’ll have to implement it for yourself.

Auto-generated HTML page

• This page is used keeping SEO in view
• Search engines will find this page useful to index the content of the site as they find it difficult to index flash content
• Also, visitors who do not have Flash player plugin installed on their browser will be shown this page with a link to install Flash player
• The HTML page is generated dynamically from the same XML files used to generate the Flash website. So you don’t have to worry about maintenance of the HTML page. Change the content of the XML files and…VOILA!…the content of the HTML page is also updated
• Your server needs to have PHP 5 .0 and server side XSLT support to generate the HTML page
• I’ve included how to find this out in the help file
• See the generated HTML page here

Main Menu features

• Choose if the background slideshow must be on/off for a particular menu item
• Choose if a particular menu item is available in Flash site and HTML template or not (this is because both Flash and HTML versions use the same XML file to generate the main menu. See how different the menu items are in both versions.)

Contact form

The template comes with a simple contact form for your visitors to contact you.

MP3 player

The template comes with a simple MP3 player that plays a single track. You can change the path of the MP3 file in XML.

Documentation

The template comes with some solid documentation of about 34 pages help file. (See the contents of the help file here). There is also a separate folder named apidocs which contains documentation for all the classes in the template.

So, what are you waiting for? Get the template  today! I'm always available to provide support for small queries.

• Bluehost – web hosting provider
• Wordpress – blogging platform
• Achromatic – wordpress theme

Wordpress plugins:

• Contact form 7 – form for the contact page
• Lightbox gallery – to display galleries in my posts
• FollowMe – Follow me twitter button on the right side of the blog
• Google Analytics for wordpress – google analytics tracking
• GRAND Flash Album Gallery – a flash album (just for fun!)
• Maintenance Mode – display message when the blog is down for maintenance
• Page Links To – link the pages' menu items to external links
• SexyBookmarks – bookmarking widget
• WordTwit – post a tweet to your twitter account when you write a new blog post
• WP-Polls – create polls on the blog
• WP-Print – useful if you want your visitors to print posts
• WP-SpamFree – Protect your blog from spam
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – comment editing plugin for users and admin
• Organize Series – organize series (tutorial series, etc) that I write on the blog
• Similar posts – to display posts that are similar to the post that is currently being read by the visitor
• WP SWFObject – embed flash files in a post
• WP DB Backup – backup wordpress database
• Wordpress video widget – embed videos from popular services in the sidebar
• Wordpress video plugin – embed videos from popular services in a blog post
• I like this – let your readers express their liking for a post with just a click
• WP-Paginate – a pagination solution for wordpress
• SEO Ultimate – Search Engine Optimization for the blog

I hope that this list will help you out with your blog. Do you know any interesting things to add to this list? Please do in the comments.