Gits Everywhere
Another long break between blog posts. Mostly out of laziness but also because I am trying to learn and teach myself Android programming. Here’s a short post about how I’m getting along.
The first hurdle is to get all of your project tools set up and running correctly. This has vastly improved since the last time I tried it out. Now there is a single package (ADT Bundle) to install that provides you with a development IDE, the SDK and the Android Tools to get you going. You can find this on the revamped Android Development website. There are also a bunch of tutorials that are very helpful which I suggest you look at and try to follow.
Secondly have a separate tab constantly open to StackOverflow. You’ll thank me later.
Lastly I signed up for GitHub access to share the code and get help from other programmers. Perhaps at a later date I will write how to set up Git with Eclipse (it’s not that difficult, but it took me about four attempts).
You can find my code on my user page on GitHub.
The code for Sean’s Penguins can be found here. It’s all open source because my primary focus is learning and I also want to say that I am an open source project lead!
The application is meant to be a simple image gallery. The source for the images is currently a penguin related icanhascheezburger search. This gets parsed by a rather brilliant library called JSoup and displayed in a gallery which is scrollable. I use another library to help me out here called URLImageViewHelper.
Current problems are that it is mostly a hack job and not something I can truly call my own at the moment - I’m using two libraries to do the clever stuff. I have a list of improvements I want to make too. Hopefully I will get around to them over the next few weeks.
- Fix the layout - You’ll notice that the title doesn’t appear in the correct place.
- Make the images scalable with pinch to zoom affects.
- Swap out for a Google Image search instead - Get some exposure to using a proper API (JSON based) instead of scraping a web page.
- Allow more than 6 images - 6 is the number on each page of the website I’m scraping from.
- Fix the application icons - They are low resolution and could be better.
- Have a start up image - To be displayed whilst the images are downloading in the background.
- Remove URLImageViewHelper dependency - Perhaps cache the images for performance so it is not always fetching.
- Implement a sharing menu - Using intents?
- Implement a proper application life cycle - At the moment I am at the mercy of the defaults and am probably leaking memory very badly.
- Sign the application - For publishing to Google Play.
Fun!