A journey through stuff...

NLCS Goodness

scott@n3bu1a.com — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:33:00 GMT

Well... it's October and my beloved Cardinals are in the hunt for another World Championship. We may have lost Game 1 with the Brewers, but we have something they don't!

Follow the Busch Squirrel on Twitter!

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RIP Steve Jobs

scott@n3bu1a.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:50:00 GMT

I was sitting on my couch watching TV with my wife when I heard the news about Steve Jobs. By now, I'm sure everyone has heard about his passing. No other individual has been as iconic or impressive as Steve Jobs. No aspect of IT has been unchanged by this remarkable individual. Thank you Steve, for your actions have in no small way impacted me.

(thanks to apple.com for the image)
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ClubVision Is Available!

scott@n3bu1a.com — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:39:00 GMT

Two blog posts in one day! It's a sign of the end times.

So a side project I have been working on since February is finally coming to fruition! ClubVision, a startup in St. Louis, is a company that is bringing night life to the mobile world. We've been running around the city installing cameras that stream to our mobile app, which as of 3:00PM CST, is now available for public use as an Alpha product.

I love this product because it brings an immediate, real-time view of participating venues directly to my phone. I can now tell what is happening at various venues across the city, and from that I can make an informed decision on where to spend my money and time.

This marks an amazing point in my professional career because it is the second Android application I have developed (the first being 1poo3) that is now available to the world at large. A huge shout out to Brian Blanchard, Muljadi Budiman and Doug Wulf for making this happen. I am so excited about this milestone!

I want to also thank my wife... Without her support, I would never have been able to make it through the grueling days/times necessary to make this happen. Thanks Sara, and much Kinkos!
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Tags: ClubVision,Android

Using Ant with Android and IntelliJ

scott@n3bu1a.com — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:02:00 GMT

As some may be aware, I have been putting some of my efforts towards becoming an android developer. As a .Net developer, I absolutely loathe Eclipse, which is the Google preferred IDE. The good folks at JetBrains have updated their IntelliJ IDEA IDE about a year ago to work natively with the Android SDK. As a .Net developer, this is awesome!

Anyway, one of the struggles I have had is getting my Android APK to use the proguard configuration from IntelliJ, which kind of isn't good since it's use is recommended prior to deploying an application. Well... today I figured out how to make this whole thing work.

Step 1: Update local.properties
My build script kept failing because the SDK path was wrong. I use Linux as my principal Android developer machine, and the path in local.properties was incorrect. It was basically missing an x in the path, but once I updated it, it worked like a charm.

Previous Setting: sdk.dir=/home/scott/android-sdk-linux_86
New Setting: sdk.dir=/home/scott/android-sdk-linux_x86

Step 2: Install Ant
This threw me for a loop since IntelliJ IDEA has tight integration with Ant. I use Linux Mint, so a quick

sudo apt-get install ant

fixed that issue.

Step 3: Run Ant
From my command line, I needed to run ant. To do so, make sure you're in your project directory, then type in

ant release

This will cause ant to build a release version of your APK. Hooray!

Side note, if you want to enable automatic signing as part of your build process, you can do that. In your build.properties file, add two lines:

key.store=
key.alias=
During your build, you will be prompted for a password for your Key store and alias.  If you mess either up, it will fail during compilation.



Hope this helps!

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Tags: Android,development,continuous integration

In-App Billing Presentation

scott@n3bu1a.com — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:50:00 GMT

So last night I gave a presentation on In-App Billing using the Android SDK at the St. Louis Mobile Development User Group (hosted at Asynchrony). This was a first for me, as I have only presented on .Net or DotNetNuke topics at the St. Louis .Net User Group or St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group meetings.

All in all, it went very well. I surprised myself by actually knowing the topic fairly well, and the questions posed by the attendees were pretty answerable. The presentation itself (which will be posted soon) covered:

why Google provides an interface for In-App Billing, and not an interface for In-App Purchasing
the business and technical requirements for developing against the service
some pointers on testing
and then a review of some In-App Billing examples.

The meeting itself was unique in that I was not the only presenter. Justin Miller presented some information on an Android application, and Heath Borders gave us a preview of his StrangeLoop presentation on automated testing for iOS. StrangeLoop attendees are in for a treat!

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Tags: Android,development,presentations

Using App_LocalResources in a DNN Module

scott@n3bu1a.com — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:56:00 GMT

A frustrating problem with a simple solution for custom module development using resource files.

Tags: dotnetnuke,development