Talking Technology on the First Crack Podcast

I was interviewed for a podcast with Garrick Van Buren from First Crack Podcast earlier this year and have just realized, I never posted the details! It was great amount of fun and we talked about all sorts of technology items related to VoIP, Asterisk and the Mobile Twin Cities Users Group that I had just formed at the time. I also realized as look back that we touched on an excellent book called "Hot Flat And Crowded", by Thomas Friedman that I think any kid growing up today should read. It's fascinating to realize just how much we will need to innovate as a species if we are going to survive on this plant. I'll leave at that. I fully recommend picking up the book!

You can read the discussion and listen to the entire podcast here.

Hope you enjoy it!

Recursive Awesome Formed

It's been a little while since my last post, as it's been a wild and crazy summer, but I am finally getting around to giving an update on what been going on with me related to mobile software development and business.
I'm super excited to let everyone know that I have co-founded a company with a good friend and colleague of mine named Sam Schroeder. Sam and I developed a product together this summer for ourselves around the area of mobile video distribution and branding called Mobile Vidhub. While we were developing this product, Sam and I were working a number of other projects together and decided it made sense to join forces and go into business together. Our new company ( Recursive Awesome, LLC ) focuses on developing mobile application on the 4 leading smartphone platforms ( Android, Blacberry, iPhone and Palm ). We both agree that using agile software development practices is the most effective way to develop software. We build not only mobile, but server side applications using Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework.
We hope you check out our business, keep us in mind and please let us know if you are in need of our services. Sam and I are always interested in working with startups and new ideas, no matter how large or small. We have a wide array of experience related to software development and good contacts in the local community to help scale your project up as needed. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Google Technology Users Group

Just a quick note that I presented on Android at the local Twin Cities Google Technology User's Group this past week. I had to cover material for about 2 hours worth of time. It was a great experience and all who attended I felt get a lot out of the presentation. It's great see interest in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area build around Android and having been working with the platform in some shape or form for close to the past year, I feel like I'm really starting to master it and enjoy sharing my experience with others.
If you are in need of a person to train or bring your development staff up to date on Android, please contact me and let me know.
I also have posted all of the code that I wrote that night for the meeting and all of my slides up on GitHiub. You can find it all here:
http://github.com/justingrammens/tcgtug

For more in formation on the TCGTUG, you can find their website here:
http://tc-gtug.org/

POST JSON from Android using HttpClient

I'm using Ruby on Rails on the server and needed to post JSON to it from Android. Here's some quick code that I wrote to do this. Hopefully it helps someone else. All of the tutorials that I found didn't work. You basically need to make sure you post data in JSON format. Just seetting parameters won't do the trick.

In my case I had to create JSON something like:
{ fan: { email : 'foo@bar.com' } }

which equates to the HTML form input:
<input name="fan[email]" type="text"/>

To POST in Android. You can use something like this code.

public static String makeRequest(String path, Map params)
throws Exception {

DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httpost = new HttpPost(path);
Iterator iter = params.entrySet().iterator();

JSONObject holder = new JSONObject();

while(iter.hasNext()) {
Map.Entry pairs = (Map.Entry)iter.next();
String key = (String)pairs.getKey();
Map m = (Map)pairs.getValue();
   
JSONObject data = new JSONObject();
Iterator iter2 = m.entrySet().iterator();
while(iter2.hasNext()) {
Map.Entry pairs2 = (Map.Entry)iter2.next();
data.put((String)pairs2.getKey(), (String)pairs2.getValue());
}
holder.put(key, data);
}

StringEntity se = new StringEntity(holder.toString());
httpost.setEntity(se);
httpost.setHeader("Accept", "application/json");
httpost.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");

ResponseHandler responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
response = httpclient.execute(httpost, responseHandler);
}

Finding Skins Under Android 1.5

I was testing using some custom skins under the Android SDK 1.5 and was a little perplexed that all of the documentation I read told me to put the skins in the directory

$SDK_ROOT/tools/lib/images/skins

This is not correct under Android 1.5 SDK! Instead you want to put them into the directory

$SDK_ROOT/platforms/android-1.5/skins

This discussion on the Android Google Group helped me.
http://is.gd/1ouFs

Also, you can find many cool skins here:
http://teavuihuang.com/android/

Hoping this will save others wasted time.

Mobile Software Development at Localtone

If some of you have been following me on Twitter you might have seen that I'm becoming actively involved in mobile software development. I thought might be good to do quick post relating to the some of the talks that I've given on the subject and a presentations I have coming up this month. If you are looking to learn more about mobile and are local to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, I suggest you join us at one of the Mobile Twin Cities User's group meetings that I have founded. a BIG thanks to everyone who has presented at the previous meetings an Breon Nagy for recording our presentations!

Mobile Twin Cities
http://mobiletwincities.com - We meet the third Tuesday of the month.

Watch us online realtime or archived videos from the meetings can be found here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/MobileTC

Twin Cities Java user's Group - (TCJUG)
I presented at TCJUG where I showed my "Contratoid" Android app and deployed it to the Android market all in one evening.

Video, source code and slide from this meeting can be found here.

Video at: http://is.gd/U4Zr (the presentation starts about 10 minutes into the video)
Source at: http://is.gd/TZFP
Slides at: http://is.gd/U5tM

I presented on Android at the Ruby User's of MN (RUM) group. Slide from this presentation can be found here.

http://www.slideshare.net/justingrammens/AndroidIntro

If VoIP is your things, I also spoke on Adhearsion as well at RUM. Slides from that presentation can be found here:

http://www.slideshare.net/justingrammens/voice-enabled-applications

Finally, I'll be talking about Android at the Penguin's Unbound meeting this weekend where we'll try and create another Android app and deploy it to the market. Hope you can attended.

http://is.gd/1ayaT

I'm available for consulting around mobile software development on all devices. Would be more than happy to spend some time talking with your organization around how you can use mobile and VoIP technologies.

Android Themes

Here's a good blog post on doing themes within Android. With the latest release of Android 1.5, the interface is looking much more clean and adding themes to your application can really give you that "wow" factor to you users.

You can read more on the blog post and specifics around giving you application a them here.