My latest programming challenge - Android

Every year I try to learn at least one more programming language or technology. At the moment, discovering the high's and low's of Android development. Everything was going well and then upgraded to Android Studio 0.2. So after modifying my glade.build file so that that the section is equivalent to:

dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.5.+'
        .... additional classpath's
    }

due to Android Studio 0.2 supporting gradle 0.5.0 or latter, and the previous version of Android Studio using gradle 0.4. I was confronted with this error:

Gradle: 
FAILURE: Could not determine which tasks to execute.
* What went wrong:
Task 'assemble' not found in root project 'XXXXXXXXProject'.
* Try:
Run gradle tasks to get a list of available tasks.

This is due to the earlier Android Studio creating a misconfigured the IDEA file (e.g. the .iml file) where an extra <component name="FacetManager"> XML element is added. The solution is to edit the .iml file and remove the element.

I finally own a smartphone, and it's not an iPhone

After years of being an outcast amongst my colleagues, happy with a simple mobile phone that just made phone calls, I made the decision to upgrade to a smartphone. Why would I, since I was actually happy with my "no frills" Nokia and it's excellent battery life which makes a smartphone look retarded. At work we are working on making our web applications more mobile friendly, so we needed a range of smartphones to get a "real" feel of usability and performance, especially when utilising HTML bells and whistles.

Since a MacBook Pro is my development platform of choice (with VMWare Fusion allowing me to use Linux and Windows whenever I want to), and that I am a happy iPad user, it would be assumed that I would get an iPhone. Since there was already a glut of iPhones and Blackberries amongst my co-workers, and I have been envious of my Google friends and their Android phones. So a "droid" shopping I went. So what did I get - a powerful HTC or Samsung Galaxy, import a Nexus S? No, I purchased an affordable (AUD299), middle of the range Motorola XT5 running Android Eclair 2.1 Why? As I said previously, we wanted to test "real" usability and performance, and the majority of our users who had Andriod phones would not be running 2.2/2.3 or have the latest 1 GHz processors. As developers we need to remember that our users do not always have the luxury of upgrading when the next great piece of hardware and/or software arrives, and we need to ensure our applications perform well on a wide range of platforms. Certainly we should the extra capabilities of the latest devices, but also ensure a good experience for those users without the extras.

To-date I am very happy with performance of my XT5 and Eclair functionality. Now if I can stop writing little python scripts that do things on my phone, I can get back to testing the application performance.