Posted on 18 Nov 2014 in android, java, eventbus by Greg E.
Using an AsyncTask to do background work is common, but has pitfalls when used to send results back to the UI. An AsyncTask should never be tied to the lifecycle of the Activity or Fragment where it was created. Here's a simple example of how to use an Event Bus to decouple the background work from the elements that started it....
Posted on 20 Sep 2014 in android, services, billing by Greg E.
Like many other developers I got the email "Google Play In-app Billing Version 2 will be shut down in January 2015". But this isn't just a matter of dropping in a new library and recompiling. This is a completely new pattern for doing in-app purchasing.
In this post I ran through the experience I had switching from the V2 to V3 billing API for a couple of my apps. I also threw out some thoughts on why this API really is better and easier to work with....
Posted on 02 Jun 2014 in android, java, ibeacon by Greg E.
Android support for iBeacons is, at the time of this writing, sketchy at best. There is no actual support for it directly in the Android SDK and only a handful of phone models have the hardware necessary to support the BLE technology used by iBeacons.
I have a project where we want to simply detect the presence of iBeacons and show some different UI in the app if one of "ours" is found. We're not doing anything fancier than that, so it seemed a 3rd party library might be a reasonable option until the Android OS (or actually, hopefully the compatibility/support library) adds official support for it.
I decided to try the Radius Networks library because it seemed to be open source (or so I thought) and they seem to know what they are doing....
Posted on 20 May 2014 in c#, asp.net, nodejs by Greg E.
Watching Scott Hanselman on stage at TechEd using a Mac must have raised some eyebrows but then watching him deploy and run an ASP.NET app on the Mac OS command line must have seriously blown some minds.
Microsoft just recently announced ASP.NET vNext. What is interesting about this is it is not just some new features or new tooling. This is a total re-write and re-think of ASP.NET itself. But it isn't really new....
Posted on 26 Apr 2014 in android, java, unity, vuforia by Greg E.
Normally a Unity 3D application is built as a stand-alone app that has a thin wrapper over it for running natively on the various mobile platforms.
I had a project where I needed to host the Unity 3D view inside the app, but the app still has many functions and features of a normal native app and those cannot be done in the 3D engine. This is not documented and not supported, but it's possible. To make things a little more interesting I also had to do this with the Vuforia augmented reality library in the mix as well....