Tag java

Slot Racing 10th anniversary

This year marks the 10th anniversary of my Slot Racing Android game. I had initially begun working on a 2.0 version, but I couldn’t find the time. A few months ago, I decided to merge the changes back into the…

Converting Carballo to Kotlin

Kotlin is a JVM language developed by JetBrains: http://kotlinlang.org gaining momentum among Android developers. Kotlin has interesting features like: It can be compiled to bytecode compatible with Java >=6, allowing to use a lot of Java 7-8 features (lambdas…)  in Java…

Benchmarking Java to native compilers

Java to native compilers have been around for some years, and I was curious about if one of this solutions could improve the performance of my Carballo Chess Engine. I ran a tournament between binaries of the Carballo development version (1.5)…

Running Android apps inside Chrome

I couldn’t believe it when somebody told me: Google is running Android apps in ChromeBooks and some selected apps can be installed from the Chrome Webstore. It works with a Chrome extension that implements an Android virtual machine running over…

My Gradle Tips and Tricks

The new Android build system is based in Gradle, an advanced build tool that simplifies build automation. I used Maven for many years and Gradle project structure is very similar, but Gradle configuration files are Groovy-based and much (much!) more…

JavaScript as a Runtime

The future is here, and JavaScript (JS) is everywhere, but JS development is so hard that many people prefer to develop in other languages and then compile their code to JS, using JS as a universal runtime. Here are the…

Mobile 2.0 Open Ideas

This year I was invited to organize a workshop at the Mobile 2.0 Open Ideas event at Barcelona, on 16-17 June. With my experience developing Android apps at Mobialia and the social media integration on Martin Varsavsky’s RadioMe, I proposed…

A small problem with the facebook Android SDK

At Mobialia the lasts weeks I was involved on the development of a social app using , among other social networks APIs, the facebook API. For me it was easier to implement Twitter API access using only the signpost library,…

Using two location providers on Android

Android has two kinds of accuracy on location: This location methods can be enabled or disabled by the user on the preferences or with some widgets. Initially on our apps we used only one LocationProvider with “Fine” accuracy: As the…