Androids, Androids everywhere

So, app number one has been yelled at in the market for some week and app number two is ready to be delivered. I'm almost a REAL android hacker now, who could have believed ?

To be honest, app number one was a simple try to get to know the procedure. I mean, nobody really needed an app that wrote and told them random insults. But it was fun to play with, and I learned a lot from it. My intention is to write a tutorial about it, the hard parts (expect for the speech, that was actually a little tricky with the localization) were the ads. Well, I settled for admob and adwhirl, but to actually generate some money, you'll need more networks for sure.

Anyway, I plan to release a BeerSweeper game, hopefully I'll manage to get adsense network in that but who knows...

Getting started with an amazing Android app

Well, there's two things in the universe that a pragmatic programmer needs to deal with today to be future-proof, the cloud and mobile apps. I've already played with googles appengine and Microsofts Azure so it's time to play with mobile apps. (To be honest, I've cheated with it before but never built anything worth mentioning).

Since I'm the owner of a HTC Desire I will build a small android app, create a market account, get some ads in it (perhaps it might be enough revenue to get a saturday pizza?) and publish it for the world to admire.

To get going, there are some things needed. The gurus recommends eclipse for development, so I need that one. I need to spice it up with the android plugins, that means adding https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ as an update site and get everything offered. I also need the android-sdk and the tools that come with it.

That would do to get started, but there a lot of other tools. I highly recommend DroidDraw for designing the GUI, the others I haven't used.. yet.

PHP? Me?

It is kind of weird, I have probably made "hello world" - alike applications in almost every weird language out there. However, I haven't touched PHP since version 3x and I never made anything seious with it. I went on to Java, Python and Ruby. I admit, I actually didn't like PHP that much, putting code and HTML in the same file was not a nice way to do it. And with PHP 3x .. you could forget all about OOP.

However, it looks like I might end up doing some PHP in my "bread and butter" coding, so I started to peek at it again. I found some OOP tutorials over at KillerPHP and well, I don't feel like vomiting just yet..

Gorm & ProjectCenter

Long day today, and since it's fathers day and I happen to be one, there hasn't been much time playing with GNUstep. Howeverm I concluded that most of the documentation and turorial isn't realy up to date. Most of them won't actually work at all, so my hope is that old apple/xcode documentation might be useful.

Anyway, this short instruction video seem to work, better try that out when the kids hit the bed. 

Hello Objective-C

No solution to the evil Gorm association in ProjectCenter so far. However, I use WindowMaker and Gvim and do some GNUstep/Objective-C coding anyway.

Just to make sure that everything is working, here's some nice GNUstep code to display a panelalert.

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <AppKit/AppKit.h>

int 
main (void)
{
  NSAutoreleasePool *pool;
  
  pool = [NSAutoreleasePool new];
  
  [NSApplication sharedApplication];
  
  NSRunAlertPanel (@"Test", @"Hello from the GNUstep AppKit", 
                   nil, nil, nil);

  return 0;
}

To build this one in the terminal, you better write a GNUmakefile. That's actually the name you have to give it. (you can read all about it here )
the content for now should be

include $(GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES)/common.make
APP_NAME = FirstApp

FirstApp_OBJC_FILES = source.m
include $(GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES)/application.make

Simply type "make" and there's your .app. Run it with "openapp ./FirstApp.app".
If "make" gives you a headache, make sure you have the GNUstep-dev package installed if you went the app-get path, and check your variables with "env | grep GNU". (ignore the old GNU_ROOT.. variables though)

Daily struggle and PDFKit

This day I have two problems to solve. I would like to get my WindowManager to look better, move away not needed components (since I run Gwortkspace) and persist a better resolution.
More important, I need to be able to open Project-Centers .gorm files with Gorm so that I can build the worlds most fashionable Objective-C application upon the face of the earth,

A note, a helpful member of the GNUstep mailinglist hinted that the following instructions might have helped PDFKit

./configure --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2
--with-freetype2-library=/usr/lib

I will definietly try that out next build! 

So stupid...

Sometimes, everything moves to fast.
GWorkspace is a GNUstep app. You don't run GNUstep apps like ./ appname. You run GNUstep apps with "openapp GWorkspace" .. and yes, everything worked fine so far.
Now I'm heading off having some "be ashamed" drinks..