Eclipse CDT and Google GTest

If you have read my previous post about adding the gTest framework to your C++ project, you are very likely to have spent quite some time scratching your head trying to figure out how to make it play nicely with Eclipse's CDT, and its (let's face it) not terribly well-developed concept of 'Build Configurations'.


THIS BLOG HAS MOVED TO codetrips.com

Please read the rest of this post on codetrips.com

Mobile templates

Just enabled "Mobile Templates" for this blog: check it out on your iPad, Android, iPhone, or mobile device: it looks really cool on my HTC Evo!

Run Android tests in a connected device

Not quite sure as to why it never occurred to me, but it is totally possible and legal to run unit tests inside a real device, connected to your dev box via a USB cable.


An obvious advantage is that you are now running your tests in a more "realistic" environment; there are no drawbacks that I can think of (unless your device has some weird 'lockdown' imposed by the manufacturer / cell provider); and... that's when you realize just how much faster than an emulator that is.


So here's the day's top-tip: if you are in a hurry, and have a lot of unit test you want to run, get that USB cable out!

Using the same model classes in Android, GWT and JPA (Part II)

In a recent post, I've demonstrated how one can use the same domain-specific (Model) classes end-to-end, from the Mobile layer, to the GWT Front-End, up to server-side and Persistence layer (JPA).

This blog has now been moved to codetrips.com: please read the rest of this post here.

Android Draw 9-patch seems broken too

As far as I can tell, the current release of the Android SDK (R08) ships without the Swing Desktop jar, and this causes draw9patch to fail.

~$ draw9patch &
[2] 52452
~$ Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
       org/jdesktop/swingworker/SwingWorker
 at com.android.draw9patch.Application$1.run(Application.java:48)
 at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
 at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:461)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:269)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:190)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:176)
 at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:110)

[2]+  Done                    draw9patch

The 'fix' is rather simple: just download the JAR for Swing Desktop from here, and drop the swinglabs-0.8.0.jar file into the [sdk-install-dir]/tools/lib folder.

The Swing Desktop project can be found here.

Update -- Richard just left a comment here and pointed me to his site (Android 9 Patch) who's got plenty of 9-patch icons that really look awesome, and I thought I'd share the goodness (especially, given he's so kind as to share them at no charge). 

Go check out Patch 15, it's pretty impressive!

Carrier BIlling comes to Android!

Some of you folks may have recently noticed a little remark at the bottom of an email from the Android Market folks:

Finally, we wanted to bring to your attention that Android Market now offers a new form of payment for users on the AT&T network -- Direct Carrier Billing. This payment option lets Android users on the AT&T network purchase applications more easily.

This is an awesome achievement on the part of the Google folks, which integrates payments made by users into their phone bills, if they are AT&T customers: in turn, this enables us (the developers) to receive our payments via fewer user clicks and in a more streamlined way, so as to smooth the path for the user to purchase our Apps.

And all that, at virtually no additional complexity for us, which is, I'd say, pretty awesome!

I would expect more integrations and more awesomeness in the next few months: stay tuned!

Latest update for Android SDK breaks for Ubuntu Karmic

If you have recently updated your Android SDK to R08 (Gingerbread, 2.3) on Linux and are using Ubuntu Karmic, chances are that you will not be able to run the emulator: It will simply die with the following error:


$ ./emulator
./emulator: /lib32/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.11' not found (required by ./emulator)


This is caused by an incompatibility with Karmic's installed GLIBC - the new SDK/Emulator works just fine on Lucid.


The Android team is working on a fix - in the meantime, a workaround is to download the _r07 of the tools from here, and replace emulator in the tools/ folder under the android_sdk installation folder.


A bit hacky, but works.