A tutorial I wrote for .NET Magazine is now up on their site. This tutorial takes you through the basics of getting NFC working with Android 4.0+ with a “Top Trumps” like demo. It covers both reading and writing data to/from NFC tags, stickers or cards. Head over to .NET Magazine to read the tutorial!
We had what was probably the first BBQ weather of the year over the weekend, but I wouldn’t know about that. Instead I spent the time coding away at the NFC Hackathon (sponsored by O2) with my fellow team members George Medve and Aaron Newton. The idea was to spend 28 hours designing and coding something that made use of NFC (Near Field Communication). We were supplied with NFC enabled Galaxy S2s and some useful SDKs from Proxama and BlueVia for tracking NFC campaigns, making payments and tracking users....
My latest Android project is now live. This app for FanChants.com provides access to the 20,000 real football chants as sung by fans all over the world. Chants include lyrics and through an in-app-purchase chants can be set as your phone’s ringtone. View FanChants over at Google Play
I’m pleased to announce a game we’ve been working on is now out. A collaboration between The Creation Agency and Bitmode (my previous home), we bring you The Great Snowball Fight! The game is played over Google Maps, launching virtual snowballs at unsuspecting players in order to rank up, earn points and even win prizes from retailers you hit. You can also add buddies, connect via Facebook and receive special powerups....
I recently wrote a tutorial for .NET Magazine covering styling and theming components in Android. This includes how to use resolution independent units so that your UI looks crisp across a wide range of devices and 9-patch images for smooth scaling. Here’s a link to the article.
I was absolutely delighted to hear that the app I put together for the Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards has been made a finalist. The app, “Are You OK” falls under the wellbeing category. If you’re not familar with the awards, the idea is to improve the lives of the elderly or disabled through technology. Are You OK is a simple app that was inspired by the panic button pendants many elderly use in their homes....
The Android Workshop is coming to TechHub in London, tickets are now available for Thursday 24th and Friday 25th of November this year. It’s a full 2 day introduction covering a wide range of topics from layouts and widgets to styling and database access, for more info please head over to the site. Sign up fast to guarantee your Early Bird price, or add yourself to the mailing list for future events....
Earlier today Paulo Fierro blogged an example of how to build a dynamic application cache manifest for HTML5 web apps using Ruby. A cache manifest is a text file that browsers look for in order to determine which files to store locally on the device, this lets you open the site/app offline, great for web apps (on iOS bookmarking a site to the home screen also let’s you specify an icon and removes browser chrome)....
I’ve just finished reading through a copy of Android Wireless Application Development (Addison Wesley Developer’s Library, 2010 by Lauren Darcey & Shane Condor). Having read a few books on Android development over the last couple of years, it’s always interesting to see how a book tackles this big, constantly evolving platform. The book covers Android up to version 2.2 and includes access to the online Safari edition which hopefully means they can add a few post-print updates where necessary....
I’ll be running a 2 day introduction to Android development workshop at UpdateConf in Brighton this September. If you’re looking to get into Android development, this will get you up and running lickety-split. Sign up for updates over at the website and follow the Twitter account @androidws. If you have any questions about the content anything else, please drop me a comment or tweet.