– Idea Roulette – Mobbo: Where is Everybody?

No, this is not yet another vague headline nor any sort of developer-optimistic timeline planning. Rather the goal is to show how to take advantage of App Engine to make the difference in situations where there’s scarcity on resources, especially in the are of system administration and backend infrastructure, so that all of you, the doers, creators, inventors but even also the small agencies, start-ups or any other kind of company who struggles with infrastructure at the very beginning, can invest your resources on just thinking about solving specific issues of your project and nothing else.

Our Next Big Thing – Shh It’s a Secret

I’m not wanting to let you down here, therefore we’ll choose a decent candidate for “our next big thing” risen the circumstances. We’ll call it Mobbo and it’s about knowing where big groups of people are within of your surroundings, so that you can decide to join or avoid them. Note the variety of situations where this applies: crowded routes in traffic, night life trends, shopping, getting to know special events, etc. Sure, we are all extremely concerned about privacy these days, that’s why we’ll just gather coarse, anonymous and randomized location information about the users who use/contribute to our app. Remember that we only need to know where big masses of people are, that means that we can obviate the exact location for any specific individual. It’ll be like building a very high tower in the middle of every city and letting people climb up to see how things look like from there.

Sticky List Footer for Android

This brief tutorial covers a simple approach to place a view in the bottom of its parent in order complement the information provided by any kind of scrolling view. Due to the massive usage of ListViews, this example will use it as a basis. The container suggested behaves similarly as a list footer does, with the difference that this one stays at the bottom, independently of the view, even when there’s no sufficient content within the list to cover it. At the bottom of this text, links to the source code, a demo video and the covered sample app to download from Google Play are included. Note that it has been intended to work the same way in pre-ICS versions of Android.

Using Runnables, Queues and Executors to Perform Tasks in Background Threads in Android

This post is meant to be an extension of There’s life after Asynctasks in Android but can be perfectly applied out of this context in whatever situation fits better to your needs.
Note that in the end it is all about getting things done in a worker thread in a known order.

If ants, food, routes, lanes and winter are not familiar words to you, don’t panic. This time we’ll work away from analogies by simulating the whole thing for real. We are the queen of ants (our Activity), and we want to get some of our ants to go and get some food for the winter. We’ll enqueue them in a pool of threads so that they’ll do the job transparently for us, hence we can pay attention to other important stuff. After that and if we have some free time we’ll be notified with the amount of food brought by each ant and the total gathered so far.

Mmmm, I know it sounds weird, let’s clarify that a bit.

There’s Life After AsyncTasks in Android

Indeed, I’m one who thinks that AsyncTasks are one of the most helpful and easy tools for getting some work done in the background without concerning too much about sensitive lines of code.

What I pretend to cover here is a smart way of dealing with a bit more complex situations. Although it represents an ideal way of building a RESTful API, as you may see, it is applicable to a wide range of scenarios with minor tweaks.