Digital learnings and other such nonsense…
Java
How to add a splash screen to your android application in under 5 minutes
3481 days
Adding a splash screen to your application is a quick and easy way to make it look more well rounded, complete, and more professional, it can also serve as a useful distraction whereby you have an extra few seconds to initialise your application components before displaying them to the user.
In this post I’ll show you how to quickly and easily add a splash screen into your application, I’ll also show you how you can create an option whereby users may disable or enable the splash screen for subsequent launches of your application. I’ll also post up my sample code freely on Github so you can checkout what I’ve done and use as you please.
Top 10 Techie things I want to achieve in 2012
0518 days
I’m not the type of person that gets bored easily, I’ve always got many things to keep me amused, mostly side projects at home. I’m a firm believer, that if you don’t set yourself goals in the first place, then you won’t have anything to fail to achieve, so I’ve set myself a list of targets that I’d like to achieve in 2012 knowing full well I probably won’t get around to them all, but if I can do at least 3, it was worth it.
Automating android application signing and zipaligning with maven
0617 days
This is something that has had me tearing my hair out for a few days now, I was pretty much border-line braveheart-ing my screen….
I’ve recently been on a little drive to try to maven-ize my projects. All had been going well until I needed to sign and zipalign my APKs. This post will help you conquer that barrier with the use of some maven plugins.
When using ant, I was able to simply enter keystore details into build.properties and just call “ant release”. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t carry across to maven, and you have to provide some more configuration.
String concatenation operator
0625 days
The string concatenation operator is a bit like a hedgehog, it looks cute and sweet, but try to grab hold of it quickly and you’ll soon know about it…
It’s actually quite simple, however there are some traps that are very easily overlooked (just got caught out with it on a mock test, so I’m here to rant).
The rule of thumb is, that if either one of the operands being “+” is a String, then concatenation will occur, but if they are both numbers, arithmetic addition will occur. Sounds simple right? What do you think the following equate to?
The instanceof Operator
1626 days
The instanceof operator is a great way for checking if a reference variable is of a given type, in other words, does it pass the IS-A inheritance test. Ask yourself, is a Cat a Dog? A Dog a Cat? Or is a Cat an Animal and a Dog an Animal? In true Harry Hill style, there is only one way to decide….FIGHT!!!!
Have a look at my following example :
Compound Assignment Operators
0626 days
There are various compound assignment operators, however it is only necessary to know the 4 basic compound assignment operators for the exam, being as follows:
- += (Addition compound)
- -= (Subtraction compound)
- *= (Multiplication compound)
- /= (Division compound)
Essentially, they’re just a lazy way for developers to cut down on a few key strokes when typing their assignments. Consider the following examples that I’ve created to demonstrate this:
Static members…
1630 days
Statics are a rather strange beast, they belong to no instance of a class, they have no fixed abode, other than their class..
Consider the following example :
Local Variables, as far as the SCJP is concerned
0630 days
Local variables are variables that are declared locally, funny that eh? This one should be nice and easy, lets have a look at a quick example :
Other modifiers, for members…
0630 days
We’ve already touched upon various modifiers, for classes (both access and non-access), but there are also some more modifiers for members, as detailed here.
We have the following modifiers for members :
- final - Can’t be overridden
- abstract - No implementation specified, subclass must implement
- synchronized - Only a single thread of execution can pass through at a given time
- native - Implemented by a 3rd party piece of code (C++ for example)
- strictfp - Enforces foating point precision and doesn’t let the JVM do its own way
Class Modifiers (non-access)
1631 days
In addition to class access modifiers, classes can also be marked with non-access modifiers. These modifiers imply rules on a class, but are not necessarily linked to access rights.
The following non-access modifiers are available:
- final - The class can’t be extended.
- abstract - The class has to be extended, and can’t be instantiated on its own.
- strictfp - Ensures that you always get exactly the same results from your floating point calculations on every platform your application runs on. If you don’t use strictfp, the JVM implementation is free to use extra precision where available.
