Skip to main content

Adndroid apps don't have any borders (video)

This is the sixth in a series of videos provided by Google on Android programming.



Index:
00:00 Introduction
00:32 Zebra crossing application
01:35 Library app
02:14 A GeoSocial app which combines user GPS, user created photos, and Compass


My Takeaway:
Android applications do not have any borders. They can use data from other applicatiosns, they can use hardware available on the device such as camera, compass, GPS, accelerometer, etc, and they can also use content from the web API's.

The first application called Zebra Crossing is an application which can pull information from bar codes and QR codes. So if you photograph a product's bar code and give it to the application, it will pull up information about the book from the web. If on the other hand you give it a QR code from the back of a business card, it can extract contact information about that person which you can use to call or send email. The Zebra Crossing app also publishes intents, to allow other applications to communicate with it.

The second application is a library application which uses the "Zebra Crossing" app to add books to your personal library.

The third application, which I found to e really cool is an application which mashes together GPS, photographs, and the Compass to create a GeoSocial application. So here's what it does. Imagine you are on a vacation and want to locate cool things around where you are. You can use this application to find out all the photographs people have taken around that locality. If you find something you like, you can actually locate that thing (which was photographed) on a map and also use the Compass to get there. Cool isn't it?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to

Commenting your code

Comments are an integral part of any program, even though they do not contribute to the logic. Appropriate comments add to the maintainability of a software. I have heard developers complain about not remembering the logic of some code they wrote a few months back. Can you imagine how difficult it can be to understand programs written by others, when we sometimes find it hard to understand our own code. It is a nightmare to maintain programs that are not appropriately commented. Java classes should contain comments at various levels. There are two types of comments; implementation comments and documentation comments. Implementation comments usually explain design desicisions, or a particularly intricate peice of code. If you find the need to make a lot of implementation comments, then it may signal overly complex code. Documentation comments usually describe the API of a program, they are meant for developers who are going to use your classes. All classes, methods and variables

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path