Posts

It’s been a while since I posted. Since then, photup has been release to Google Play, and after some initial slowness has slowly been gaining traction. That was until last week, when two things happened: Facebook’s Android app updates, and I released a dodgy update. The Facebook Android app update doesn’t really worry me that much, it doesn’t do everything I want and I think photup feels much more intuitive anyway. The dodgy update (v1.5.2) has a bit of a balls-up from me, basically I enabled some optimisations in the PhotoProcessing lib I use, which seems to break on certain devices. Woops!

After releasing the first beta a couple of days ago, I’ve been busy at work on the second beta.

If you’ve seen my Twitter lately you’ll probably have seen that I’ve been working on a new app called ‘photup’. The basic premise of the app is to share your photos to Facebook, nice and simple! The easiest way to think about it is that it’s a Android port of Facebook’s

You may have read my last post on my techniques in Friendcaster for caching Bitmaps. In that post I argued against using LruCache and instead advocated the use of a thin cache based on SoftReferences. The main reason I argued against LruCache was because of this:

Now that I’ve got my Pi working a bit more efficiently it’s time to actually start putting it to use: a media server. This post will detail the initial steps in getting your Raspberry Pi serving media files from an external drive via DLNA.

The Raspberry Pi is pretty easy to overclock due to an inbuilt config file. This morning I decided to see how far I could push my little Pi.

After receiving my Raspberry Pi this weekend, I’ve finally had some time to have a play with it. My end goal for the little device is to convert it into a NAS serving media files across my home. For now though I’m just trying to optimise the Debian image Raspberry Pi distribute.

Following on from yesterday’s post about making Pull-to-Refresh more discoverable, today I’ve made it a bit more customisable. As you can see above, instead of the standard Android indeterminate spinner we have Andy spinning instead. This drawable is completely customisable by you.

Lots of evangelist Android developers dislike the Pull-to-Refresh pattern on Android. For instance Cyril Mottier wrote a whole blog post detailing his views and it’s well worth a read. The trouble with his arguments (in my opinion) is that he’s far too ‘pure’ in his views on using patterns from other platforms. For me, getting something which works well and people can use is more important than keeping to Google’s Pure Android guidelines.