Category: Development

I will be attending the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas. I will also be taking part in the Summit Hackathon.

“The AT&T Summit Hackathon is the premier hackathon of the year for the AT&T Developer Program. This year will be focused on wearable technologies and participants will be able to choose between a Wearables Track and an AT&T API Track. Finalists from each track will be featured in live fast pitches on stage with our executives during the keynote at the AT&T Developer Summit on January 6th. In addition, competitors will also have the ability to complete in accelerator challenges, details to be announced, which will offer prizes of up to $10,000 for eligible teams”

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Well, since my last blog entry I went to my first Hackathon, the Seattle Interactive Conference / SIC:// AT&T Hackathon. Ended up joining a team with two complete strangers, Joan Jasak and Arunabh Verma, and we end up presenting at the Conference and taking 3rd place. Check out the video http://vimeo.com/78582527

I wanted to write an App for my Android Tablet, something easy so I could get a basic understanding of what it would take to write an app. I figured that I could knock something out fairly quickly, but I didn’t know it would be this easy.

I’m a fairly big user of Eclipse, so install the the Android SDK kit and off I went.

I created a New Android Project and edited the main.xml, so it look like the following.

— code starts—

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

                     android:layout_width="fill_parent"

                     android:layout_height="fill_parent"

                     android:orientation="vertical">

  <WebView

                     android:layout_width="fill_parent"

                     android:layout_height="fill_parent"

                     android:id="@+id/webView" />

</LinearLayout>

--- code stops ---

I then updated my java code so that would use the webView toolkit and open my HTML 5 app.

--- code starts---

package com.rogerhosto.myandroidapp;

import android.app.Activity;

import android.os.Bundle;

import android.webkit.WebView;

public class MyAndroidAppActivity extends Activity {

	/** Called when the activity is first created. */

	@Override

	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

		setContentView(R.layout.main);

		WebView webView = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.webView);

		webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);

		webView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/www/index.html");

	}

}

— code stops —

Then I create a www directory in existing assets directory and created index.html for all my HTML5 code. That’s it.

Pretty Easy.

After being told that I would need to take five days to recovery from a recent surgery and being informed that they would prefer me not to work on any of the system at work well under the influence of pain killers, I started looking for thing to kill time.

Well trying to find something to do for 5 days and not having much luck, I was surfing the web using Google’s Chrome Web Browser, I started looking at their “New Tab Apps Feature” or whatever it’s called. I started thinking that would be really simple to create a web based version of the application that did roughly the something, but wasn’t dependent on the web browser. It would also be handy for all those table devices that have web browsers. It’s kind of a pain to hit those little links with fat fingers like mine. After doing a quick design in my head, I figured what the heck; I got nothing better to do.

I decided to go old school LAMP on it with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PERL. I decided to use mod_perl and MASON as my frame work, MASON being a throw back from my short stent at Amazon.com. I went with the old MVC architecture, since it’s the easiest for a one node system and because of my state of the art Dual Pentium Pro 180 MHZ, with 256G of RAM, and 14G 5400 RPM Hard Drive for the server that I was building it on.

After 5 days, a few additional week nights and Saturdays, here is what I came up withhttp://www.myapplinks.com. It is still in the Alpha/Beta stage by not a bad start.