22 Jun

Finding photos in Android - HTC Incredible vs the rest

Posted by Matt in android, htc, incredible

I'm currently working on a project that involves retrieving all photos stored on your phone. My initial research into this brought up one of Android's built-in content providers called MediaStore. The idea is that you search the MediaStore for images and it'll return you a list of photos on your device. You can then use built-in Android commands to retrieve cached thumbnails and full images.

This all sounds great, until I started implementing it and testing on my HTC Incredible.

08 Jun

iPhone vs Android - a developer's perspective

Posted by Matt in android, ios, ipad, iphone

At AREA203 Digital, we decided to write our own mobile apps as a showcase of our abilities. We have identical apps written for both iPhone and Android phones (not iPad or Android tablets at this point) and it was an eye-opening experience developing both of these.

08 Jun

Wordpress vs Drupal vs Concrete5

Posted by Matt in concrete, concrete5, drupal, wordpress

In my work at AREA203 Digital, many of our sites are written over a CMS system so the client can take on maintenance of the site themselves. I'm often asked which CMS is the best, but the answer is not always so easy.

10 Mar

SXSW festival - here I come!

Posted by Matt in south by southwest, sxsw, sxswi

I've had my eye on the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX since I moved to the US. This year I've finally been given the opportunity to head over there and see what the fuss is all about. I'm already overwhelmed by all the sessions, keynotes and parties that are taking place and I haven't even arrived yet.

I'm especially looking forward to the UX & mobile sessions, and of course getting the chance to meet like-minded individuals in a huddle of geekiness.

So, if anyone wants to meet for a drink and a chat, hit me up on twitter - @preinvent.

See you there!

UPDATE: that assumes of course that I actually get there. My first flight into Atlanta has ben cancelled, so I'll be driving the first 2 hours ;)

10 Dec

More Vector annoyances in Flash Builder 4

Posted by Matt in flash builder 4, flex, vector

Last year I expressed my disappointment regarding Flex's new Vector class.

I've now been using Flash Builder 4 (finally) for a major project, and have found more issues that have left me totally baffled.

Firstly, Vector is not an iList, so it can not be used as a dataProvider to the spark or halo components. This is insane.

Secondly, DataGrid.selectedItems returns a Vector.

. Vector is supposed to be for strongly typing elements - as every class extends Object, what is the point of a Vector.? what makes things worse is that you can't cast a Vector. to, say a Vector. - this just returns null. And because Vector doesn't provide any methods for converting to an Array or ArrayCollection, all you can do is iterate through the Vector and build up a new Array/ArrayCollection one element at a time. Why oh why oh why?!
18 Oct

Sproutcore SC.SplitView gotcha

Posted by Matt in sproutcore

I'm a total newcomer to Sproutcore. I've worked through a few of their tutorials but now I'm out running through a new app from scratch. Like all explorations into new technology there are always those gotchas that take hours to resolve. As Sproutcore is relatively new, there's not a lot of info on the web about these common gotchas, so I'm planning to document as many of them as possible here.

The first one that killed me today was using the SplitView.

30 Sep

Cellphone plan experience

Posted by Matt in at&t, cellphone, sprint, t-mobile, verizon

For the last size years my cellphone has been covered by my company so I've not had to worry so much about choosing the right plan.

Well, the time has come to go through this rigmarole and thought I'd write some notes on my first few minutes' experience of each carrier. First impressions are important in all walks of life, especially when you're deciding who to give your money to.

23 Sep

My installed Android apps

Posted by Matt in android, apps

I've been using Android for about a year now and have seen a huge increase in the number of available apps during that time. Here's a list of the apps I have installed and use the most on my HTC Incredible.

23 Sep

Error messages in classic ASP on IIS 7.5

Posted by Matt in asp, classic, debug, error, iis

I have recently been transferring some classic ASP sites over from our old servers to our new Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit cluster. For the most part the transfer went surprisingly well. However, one point that really hung me up was getting error messages beyond the standard "500 Internal Server Error" being displayed. Here's how to get proper error messages out of IIS 7.5.

09 Aug

Outlook 2010 - Broken SMTP?

Posted by Matt in 2010, outlook, smtp

As you may have read from my previous message, I'm having a problem sending basic e-mail over SMTP from Outlook 2010 to Exchange 2010. The problem doesn't, however, appear to be anything to do with Exchange after all, but a problem within Outlook.

All content © 2009-2011 Matthew Butt. All views expressed herein are my own and do not represent the views of my employer, AREA203 Digital.