Starting Android Development

Android development has become a topic of heightened interest to me recently because of reasons. Because of those reasons, I've been doing a bit of studying on the subject. I've had various Android devices for a few years now and have had a slowly growing interest in developing some apps for the platform lately, probably most notably in creating an App.net… um… app. (Seriously, why did they name a social network App.net?)

But that's not what the app that this post is about. Instead, I'm going to get my feet wet with a to do list app of questionable utility.

The general idea is to give the app a list of things to do, then whenever you're bored, you'd open the app, press a button, and it would give you a random task to do. Whether or not you actually obey the almighty to do list app is up to you. It won't care. It'll be too busy planning out what task to give you next time.

I'm naming it Randoo for now, as a quick search doesn't turn up anything on Google Play with the same name, at least at this point in time. If some better name comes along, I might change it, though.

As far as apps go, it should be pretty trivial. It needs at minimum:

• a method of entering tasks
• a method of storing those tasks
• a method of retrieving a random task
• a method of removing tasks.

I have some ideas for additional features that may be included in 1.0 or may be added in later versions:

• Set estimates for how long task will take and include an option to get a random task with a time estimate in a certain range
• In case you don't think you'll want to do a particular task for a while, include a "Do not select until" option
• Contexts. For example, if you felt like drawing something, but aren't sure what to draw, this feature would allow to avoid getting tasks like "Learn Spanish." Unless, of course, you actually put that in as something you want to draw.
• Synchronization across multiple devices. This probably won't happen unless I can manage to do it without having to buy a server or something similar.

I think that's about all I've got to say on this for the moment. I have no time estimates for when, or even if, it will be available to the general public, but visiting back here would probably be a good place to watch for more information if you're interested.

Here

So here I am, setting up a personal website. I had WordPress.com blog a few years ago. I guess I technically still have it, but I haven't done anything with it, nor do I intend to return to it.

Anyway, with this site, I'm planning on posting about things that cross my mind that I feel warrant a post, as well as, and probably more importantly, documenting various projects of mine. This website itself is the first of those projects.

I decided to go with a static site generator to build 8bittree.net. After looking at few options, including Jekyll, Hyde, Acrylamid, nanoc and Hakyll, I ended up going with Middleman. Incidentally, I think Middleman was the first one I stumbled on, though at the time, I hadn't decided what kind of software I was going to use to build my site, or even what a static site generator was. My decision was mostly driven by Middleman having a mostly bare bones base setup with lots of customizability and some decent documentation, as well as me being able to get it working at all in a fairly short period of time. I actually do think the documentation could use some fattening, but there fortunately is something of a community around it that can help answer your questions if the documentation doesn't.

In case you're wondering what a static site generator is, it's simply a tool that creates html files based on provided templates and places them in appropriate directories within a root folder. Then you just need to point your webserver at the root server and you should be ready to go. Since it spits out completed html files, there's no need for a database or dynamic page server. Being able to use template files with languages such as Haml and Markdown makes writing the site a lot easier than doing all the html by hand, especially if you've got things that need to be included in multiple pages.

I still need to do a fair amount of work here. I'd like to set up a comment system, on the off chance anybody reads something here and decides they'd like to say something. Setting up relative to now post dates would be a nice addition. And the page layouts will probably receive some more tweaking.

This website is open source. You can check it out on Bitbucket or Github.