Tearing my hair out on my latest project. So here’s some Garbage to cheer me up.

Several months ago, I was faced with a problem of passing a complex object to another Activity. There are several ways of doing this:

• “Deconstructing” the complex object to simple data types and passing them as extras through putExtra()
• Making the object Parcelable
• Making the object Serializable

It is my dream to one day attend Google I/O. But seeing as I’m from a Third World country where everyday is a practice in cost-cutting, it is very unlikely that I would fulfill that dream anytime soon. I haven’t sat down and computed the actual cost, but thinking about it makes my head spin. Off the top of my head:

• US Visa application = P6500 (~USD150)
• Round trip plane fare ticket = P90,000 (~USD2000, if I’m lucky)-
• Google I/O ticket = P21,000 (~USD450, if my research is correct)

There are times that when changing a button’s background color, we also want to change the text’s color. There is a method setTextColor(int color) specifically for this purpose. Seems pretty straightforward enough, but it took me a few tries to get it right the first time I tried using it. Documenting it here so that I wouldn’t forget.

In one of my projects, the app has the potential to display a very, and I mean very, long list. To minimize the loading time of the app, I limit the number of items initially included in the list and then add to it as the user scrolls down.

With clients demanding left and right that my app should look like an iPhone app, I tend to be unappreciative of the way Android natively handles UI interactions and such. Notice how the screen automagically scrolls up when you click on an EditText? It turns out that in iPhone development, the developer does this manually (indicate how much the view should scroll when the on-screen keyboard appears, then scroll it back down afterwards). HA!

In one of my projects, I needed to display some special characters that the Android OS by itself cannot seem to render. I figured that I would need to provide a custom font that includes the characters that I needed.

Been ultra super busy the past few weeks. Also learning a lot of new things. And renewing my battle with orientation change, AsyncTasks and dialog boxes.

Over the past couple of weeks, this blog has been getting unusually high traffic. Which means I get more than one hit per week.

If you have ever needed to use a SeekBar, you definitely would have noticed how hard it is to move the slider (aka thumb) when it is set to the minimum or maximum value. The slider tends to be cut in half, and fitting your finger into it to press it becomes a test of patience.