Solution Online

I've just finished another android app: Snake.

Here are the github repository and the .apk download links.

Screenshots:

When creating mobile or tablet applications, your assets take time to load. Wether you prefer native or hybrid development, you end up customizing splashcreens for each of the screen resolutions, layout modes (portrait or landscape). This work is a bit cumbersome and no responsive technics exist in this field.

I have come up with a nice solution that takes a single PNG file as input. This file must be designed with every constraints in mind. Therefore, I also provide a canevas that helps out its creation:

Once done, using Grunt and my plugin grunt-phonegapsplash, creating all your required splashscreens is a matter of a single command line.

Here is the basic workflow that it automatically handles for you :

The canevas and the source file are available on Github. The plugin is easily installed via npm.

By default, the Android Emulator is software based. Firing it up takes around ~1min and it consumes a lot of CPU power and battery life, which is a pain when you are using a laptop.

Along with your installation of your Android SDK Manager, there is an extra option which allows you to install HAXM, the Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager from Intel. You find it just here :


However, once downloaded, this tool is not installed automatically. You have to execute it. Open a terminal and hit the following command :

open /usr/local/opt/android-sdk/extras/intel/Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager/IntelHAXM.dmg

But wait, if you are on a OSX Mavericks or on Windows 8, don't start your Android emulator too quickly. The Android SDK provides an old release that would make your Mac or PC to hang (yerk). Fortunately, Intel provides a fix available in the Developer Zone.

OK, now, we are ready to speed up the Android Emulator.

Go back to your Android SDK Manager and in Tools > Manage AVDs , create a fresh Android Virtual Devices. In the creation pane, check the option Use Host GPU.

The speed boost is amazing: starting the Android Emulator takes now around ~30s. But it's not the only interesting side effect. Now, all your emulated apps go faster and it takes less, I mean really less, power on your host.

Just a couple of caveats though. Using the Android Emulator doesn't prevent you from testing your apps on real devices. As a matter of fact, the Intel Android Emulator uses your Intel processor (better being said than being sorry...). Therefore, your native code and by native I mean the real native code (the one being written in C or C++, not the Java code, which is called native but is more a Just in time interpretation of Java bytecode) may have quirks on MIPS processors that you just can't see on Intel's ones.

I finally started learning android and spent the last few days working on my first app: an illustration of the Monty Hall problem.

A chaque fois que vous ciblez un nouvel OS pour applications mobiles et tablettes, il est nécessaire de produire plusieurs types d'icônes. Pour alléger ce travail fastidieux, j'ai publié un plugin pour Grunt.

Un petit graphique vaut mieux qu'un long discours :


Ce plugin s'appelle grunt-svg2storeicons. Son code source est disponible sur Github et disponible sous la forme d'un module npm.