I never really liked those meetings, sitting in a room with slightly dimmed lights, participants facing a wall, watching power-point slides, and trying to follow a mostly boring presentation. A discussion – if at all – would most likely happen after the presentation. Changing laptops is too cumbersome with all the disconnecting and re-connecting of cables involved – not to talk about syncing the laptop to the projector’s max resolution.

Since most participants seem to bring a laptop, to those meetings to check Email, IM, etc. I had the idea to instead of the wall, use the laptops’ screens as a presentation canvas, i.e. we could all sit on a round table again, facing each other, instead of the wall.

I wrote a small self-contained (doesn’t use a server) multi-platform application a.k.a TiffanyScreens, to capture the presenter’s screen content and send it to the other participants. Best of all, with a simple push of a button, an observing meeting participant becomes a presenter, showing her screen’s content to the other team members.

Up to now, TiffanyScreens was implemented in pure Java. While the installer was implemented and compiled on the native platform, the application itself did not take advantage of OS native capabilities.

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Apple Store NYC, iDay -3

July 2007 in NYC – 3 days before the iPhone launch

Tomcat 7 is the first Apache Tomcat release to support the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2 specifications. Please note that Tomcat 7 requires Java 1.6 or better, but that shouldn’t be a problem, if you are running OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

On OS X 10.7 (Lion) however, Java is initially not installed anymore. You can find the installer on Apple’s support side here or follow this installation guide, provided by Adobe. Whatever you do, when opening Terminal and running java -version, you should see something like this.

java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-383-11A511)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-383, mixed mode)

Here are the easy to follow steps to get it up and running on your Mac

Occasionally, I speak at developer conferences, and recently have talked about how to add printing as feature into Android applications. As an example, I take a pretty simple application with only a few Android Activities and then show how a print intent can be integrated for mime types like image/* or application/pdf. After such a talk I have always a couple people come up that seem to be more interested in my demo app than the concept of adding printing to their own apps and they ask me where they can download the app.

Well, about three weeks ago, I decided to make my little demo app available in the Android Market. It’s a well known simple finger painting application, the display is the canvas and your finger becomes a paint brush.

Simply use your finger to create beautiful paintings. Use the Menu to change color or brush styles and also to print or share your artwork via Email etc. Become an Artist on Android and print some of your best creations. Using HP Advanced Photo Paper has produced stunning results, worth framing.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.techcasita.android.creative

“There was nothing you could have done, Luke, had you been there. You’d have been killed too, and the droids would now be in the hands of the Empire.”

While the Android SDK comes with a complete set of javadocs, the source code of the SDK is missing in the SDK distribution. This is very unfortunate, since you cannot easily debug into SDK methods (at least not without running into de-compiled code) nor can you see how things actually work.

Eclipse - Source Not Found

However, there is a quick fix to that problem. I downloaded the complete Android source including the Linux, drivers, libs, etc., like explained here: http://source.android.com/source/download.html and ran small Java program on the source tree. I used to this with a simple bash script but over the last couple of Android Releases, the java source locations got a little more diverse and I started missing a couple files. So instead, this Java program walks the source tree and looks for java source files. All those will then be copied into a new location, considering their package name. Finally, the jar tool gets called to put all the source into a single bundle for easier handling.