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.

Psi Beta student/admin portal

Link: http://psibeta.org/students/?page=welcome

Roles: DB Architect, Developer

Psi Beta is a national honor society for Psychology.
The client wanted a comprehensive administration system to allow students to register and allow the administrative staff to manage subscriptions and print membership cards and certificates.
The admin system is built upon Wordpress with various custom written plugins to manage the majority of the database work.

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.

Battery Left for Android

Link: http://preinvent.com/batteryleft

Roles: UI Developer, Designer, Publisher

The standard battery gauges on al phones show a % value that really isn't very useful. Battery Left shows how much longer your phone will last in minutes and hours before your battery runs out of juice.
The app contains a widget so you can see at a glance how your battery is doing, and detailed calibration information. The Pro version even lets you add multiple battery profiles so you can swap out batteries and calibrate each separately.

TRACK 29

Link: http://track29.co

Roles: UI Coding

Track 29 is a new music venue in Chattanooga aimed at bringing the music scene up to that of neighboring cities Atlanta, Nashville and Knoxville. The venue will be opening in September and the owners wanted a site that relays the professionalism, impact and experience that Track 29 will offer. Built on Drupal with extensive use of custom views, this dynamic site allows the Track 29 staff to update all aspects of the system.

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.

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