BitDroid 2.2 Released

After completely rewriting BitDroid, I was sure to take advantage of all the new features that Android 4+ devices have to offer. One of those features I hadn't used before was AsyncTask which helps to load data in the background without tying up the UI thread. Android 4+ devices force this behavior, in order to increase the speediness of applications, and prevent the user from wondering if the app is doing anything or not.

With this release I modified the original code to fetch user history to first pull the list and second pull the click counts for each item, and then add them to the list as they are loaded. This has significantly increased load speed as the user gets to see the most pertinent information first, the links, and then the link counts, shortly thereafter. As seen below the links are present, and the refresh animation (in the upper right) is still spinning, once they load the hyphens will turn to numbers.

I also took inspiration from Pocket, which checks the clipboard when you first load the app and asks if you want to save it to read later. I've added a fairly unobtrusive prompt that should get attention or be ignored depending on what the user wants to do.

BitDroid version 2.2 has been pushed to the play store, look for an update in the next few hours.

BitDroid Free: 

BitDroid Donate:

Controllers (ASP.NET MVC)

I had the opportunity to write up a presentation about the Controller part of ASP.NET MVC. With Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 as my guide I whipped up this presentation and some sample code.Feel free to download/read/learn/look at it as you please. 

One of my favorite things about controllers is the ability to return pretty much any type of content that you desire, files, xml, json, whatever. This makes controllers incredibly versatile and allows the developers to give the users power over what they get back (when they want to allow it).


Enjoy.

My First Android App - BitDroid

I did it, I got all the kinks worked out, made myself a fancy icon, and put menus all over the place.  My app has been published, look for it in the Android Market under "BitDroid" or "com.thunsaker" or scan this handy QR code:

The app isn't much right now, all it lets you do is enter a username, anyone will do, and it will show you the public list of urls that have been shortened by that user. Here's my list:

The application will be evolving over time, I still need to work in actual url shortening, and then verification of username with bit.ly api key.  More work, but for right now, I'm just happy to have something in the Android Marketplace.  Feedback is welcome, let me know if it crashes on you, I was only able to test on two devices: G1 and Droid Incredible.

My First Android App Preview

I was interested in android development before I bought my first Android device.  It wasn't until recently that I tried to do something more than the typical "Hello, World!" intro app.  

Switching gears from asp.net/C#  Web/Windows Mobile development to Java was quite difficult, as well as switching from the newly launched Visual Studio 2010 to Eclipse.  Its been a few years since my first Java class so I was a little rusty on the syntax, and the general practices of Java.  Thanks to numerous tutorials and open source projects I was able to find out what I needed to know to get my app to do what I want.  

I haven't gotten anything other than a custom ListView going.  The list is pulled from my bit.ly history in JSON format and placed into my custom list.  

BitDroid - Recent Links

Clicking the globe takes you to the web browser, the title is displayed at the top of each item and the full url scrolls under it.  Long press will give you options to share (though I haven't quite gotten that working yet.)

I'll be adding a login, settings and dashboard before this gets released to the Android Marketplace.

My First Chrome Extension - My Shortcuts

I threw together a Chrome extension a while back when extensions were only in the development build of Chrome.  Since then I've changed my extension quite a bit, and it now has around 4,000 weekly users.  

When I first put the extension together, it was a toolstrip on the bottom of the Chrome window.  These have since been removed in favor of BrowserActions, which are single buttons on the Chrome UI.

v. 1.0 - 1.2

I thought the toolstrip worked pretty well, but you can see how my extension would get out of hand with more than a few links.  I made the switch to using the BrowserActions, this was relatively simple, I just changed the layout to vertical.

v. 1.3

I've been making incremental changes over the last few week or so, to both speed it up and add features.  The most recent release v.2.0.3 includes a new feature that allows users to create their own links to go along with the included Google links.

v 2.1

The entire project was written with InType, which is an awesome Notepad replacement with tabs and syntax highlighting.  It works very well for javascript/css/html editing, though debugging must be done within Chrome.  Highly recommend this as a replacement for a quick text editor.


In making these changes I've tried to optimize the extension to make it as small and fast as possible.  I used Google Closure tools to minify the javascript with their Closure Compiler.  In order to do this I pulled all of my js code out of the popup and options pages and put them in their own script files.  The minification of my js files saved me a few kilobytes of space.

I was able to compress the stylesheet using CSSDrive's CSS Compressor, which only saved a few bytes, but helps nonetheless.

I ran all of my images through PunyPNG, which shrunk the overall image footprint, even though only half of my images saw any change.

I'll continue making changes and listening to the feedback from users and hopefully keep it current and usable.  Thanks for the support.


Get it here: http://bit.ly/MyShortcutsChrome