development

Fix missing plugins for Sony LiveView, Android 4+

by  • August 5, 2012 • 1 Comment

Some API / behaviour changes in Android 4+ (ICS, Jellybean), mean that many Sony LiveView plugins no longer are listed in the LiveView manager. For developers out there that are still supporting LiveView plugins, you should add the intent-filter (below) to your AndroidManifest.xml for the main Preferences activity.

<intent-filter>
  <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
  <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>

This will give your plugin an icon under the regular launcher along side other apps, and it should also appear in the plugins list under Sony’s LiveView application.

I’ve recently made this update to Wrist Tweets (demo) to make things easier for users.

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Android Intents captured by various Twitter clients

by  • January 15, 2012 • 3 Comments

For my app WristTweets, I implemented a feature where the user could press a button on the LiveView microdisplay to open a URL if one appears in the tweet. If there is no URL shared in the tweet, ideally I wanted to instead open their preferred Twitter client on their phone showing the tweet so that they could take further action (eg retweet, reply, block).

Several clients (‘official’ Twitter app and Plume) successfully capture ACTION_VIEW intents for any twitter.com URL and will display the tweet as desired. Other clients capture various other intents but don’t appear capable of opening a specific tweet via an intent. In some cases there are other undocumented intents that will allow a user profile to be opened via an intent – this is what WristTweets falls back on for clients that can’t directly open a tweet via an intent.

Since others may find this useful, shared below are the intents I discovered for Tweetdeck, Plume, Seesmic, Hootsuite, Twidroid Pro / Ubersocial, and the ‘official’ Twitter app. As far as I know none of these are officially documented, and they obviously may change without notice in future updates.

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Write an Aussie Chumby widget, win cool stuff

by  • December 23, 2008 • 0 Comments

Internode is running a Chumby competition for developers: create an Australian localised Chumby widget. The creator of the highest rated widget wins a chumby, a copy of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional and an $800 credit towards Internode services …. and lots of glory. I probably won’t have time to participate, but any keen Aussie Flash developers should really give it a shot. I reckon some sort of backyard cricket game would go down well.

chumby at home
Creative Commons License photo credit: yoppy

Entries close January 9th, 2009, so get crackin’ :) .

The Making of Astrorope: C# ported to Android Java SDK ported to iPhone

by  • October 17, 2008 • 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting breakdown by indie developer Niklas Wahrman about the development process for his game Astrorope.

It’s a bit like a “Swedish” tunnel running game crossed with CluClu Land. What’s most interesting to me is how the game was effectively ported between languages and platforms twice before the final product emerged … first written in C#, then ported to the Android Java SDK, before finally jumping on the iPhone bandwagon. I also like the discussion about keeping productive through ‘ritual’ … get up early, drink water, eat healthy, execrise, don’t overwork and take a break if you become unproductive. Good Ludum Dare advice :) .