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Yet Another DMCA Takedown

Another DMCA takedown of one of my Android apps. This time initiated by The New York Times Company for a three year old app titled “NYTimes Article Search”. Instead of having their lawyers send the DMCA notice to Google which immediately suspends the respective app, they could have just sent me an email and I’d [...]

App Engine Boilerplate 2.0 – Using html5-boilerplate v2 on Google App Engine

Just a year ago Paul Irish and several contributors started working on html5-boilerplate, a popular repository of boilerplate and best practices for creating cross-browser compatible, html5-enabled websites. Thanks to the efforts of many front-end developers and researchers who have spent countless hours on developing and evolving best practices, html5 boilerplate is rapidly maturing and establishing [...]

App Engine Boilerplate

I recently started appengine-boilerplate, a repository of often used boilerplate code for Google’s App Engine, which allows to quickly setup new projects without having to re-invent the most common wheels. All code is released under the BSD license, and It comes with the following goodies: html5-boilerplate (incl. jQuery) OpenID authentication User preferences data model (with [...]

How to get 4 to 5 stars in the Android market (Appirater for Android)

Short answer: Ask your especially engaged users to rate the app (eg. with a tool such as AppRater). iPhone developer Amro Mousa published a post yesterday with recommendations about how to reach a high average rating on the AppStore, since many app users are only remembered to rate an app on uninstalling, which naturally leads [...]

Scaling Python Servers with Worker Processes and Socket Duplication

Developing servers that scale is usually quite tricky, even more so with Python and the absence of worker threads which can run on multiple cpu cores [1]. A possible solution are worker processes that duplicate the client’s socket, a technique that allows the workers to processes requests and send responses directly to the client socket. [...]

Translating Telephones — Google Translate now with Conversation Mode

The future has arrived — translating telephones. Google engineers are alpha testing a new feature for Google Translate: “Conversation Mode”. This mode captures speech in real time, transcribes it, translates it, and speaks it out in another language with only a short delay. http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/12/android-translations/ Automated real-time translation systems will not be able to interpret deeper [...]

Android NDK updates, no more Java required

Good news for everyone wanting to do more C/C++ on Android: with the newest NDK update (r5, available in Gingerbread) it’s now possible to develop apps and games solely in C/C++, even for sound there is no Java glue necessary anymore. Google’s Android developers also added a full example Activity implemented only in C to [...]

Unicode and UTF Overview

This post is a brief technival overview of Unicode, a widely used standard for multilingual character representation, and the family of UTF-x encoding algorithms. First a brief introduction to Unicode: Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as “wide-body ASCII” that has been [...]

Advice for Android Developers: Prepare for App Acquisition

Here’s a brief but important advice for Android app developers: starting with your first app, prepare for the situation where a company wants to acquire one of your applications. Use a unique signing key (alias) for each app! Else you’ll be forced to either cancel the acquisition or hand out the key you use for [...]

Useful Linux Command of the Day: compgen

I’ve just learned about a particularly nice Linux shell command: compgen $ compgen -c … list all the commands you could run. $ compgen -a … list all the aliases you could run. $ compgen -b … list all the built-ins you could run. $ compgen -k … list all the keywords you could run. [...]