Update

I haven't had much time to get back coding in a while unfortunately. Life is a bit hectic at the minute, and I always seem to be busy with something else. Hopefully things will calm down soon enough and I'll have more time to spend relaxing and writing a bit of code. I type this now as I fight the urge to fall asleep!

Google analytics update and saving sessions. Back in the game!

These past two weeks that I've had off for Christmas have been the longest period of time that I've taken off work in the last 3 years. I didn't expect to enjoy doing literally nothing productive over the course of my time off, however it happened. I think I needed the break. I've had enough of doing nothing for now anyway, and I suppose my time away from development gave me a bit of time to think about the approach I was taking for this app.

I opened up a Claude Debussy playlist on iTunes and started coding again tonight and managed to get Google analytics working. I'm currently only tracking three pages, however once I decide on what exactly it is that I'm going to track, then I'll include more. Other changes include the addition of an abstract class for handling all of the session data. This is also used for tracking various pages. It's an abstract class with a number of variables which are encapsulated to make everything nice and tidy. The only other variable it stores for the minute about the session is the ID of the selected car. It also saves this to the app's settings upon creating and destroying the app.

I made a few slight changes to the database adapter, to include a function for getting all of the transactions for the currently selected car in the session. So that now it only shows all of the transactions and stats for the selectd car. I may include a feature to show the spending across all cars at a later point.

Also, happy new year!

Post Christmas update!

I haven't had much time to dive back in to the driver tools project yet, with all of the social events going on over the Christmas holidays. This is going to change by tomorrow. Either later on tonight or tomorrow morning, I'm going to figure out how to get google analytics working properly, and I'll be looking in to setting up some app data with regards to the car that a user will select. I'll have an update soon

First week in new job!

Last Monday I started a new job with Realex Payments as an Integration and Support Analyst. It has been an exciting week becoming familiar with my new role in the company, but unfortunately I hadn't had much time to work on my android projects lately. My weekday consists of an early start out in Monkstown which involves an hour of sitting in traffic every morning. After work after about another hour of sitting in traffic I battle falling asleep on the couch at home, so I'm usually too tired to work on projects in the evening. I do however have weekends off which is new to me, because of my previous job. I plan to make full use of this perk and get some solid development time in on the weekends that I now have off.

This weekend I'm planning on getting the back end of the app set up with a few classes for storing information about different things. I'll do a bit of reading tonight so that I'll be ready to get stuck in tomorrow and hopefully I'll have something worth adding to the project by tomorrow night.

Also, a quick stats update for the lotto checker app. I'm currently at 1859 installs and 1461 active installs. This is a 78.59% success rate with users, and my impression would be that a lot of UK users probably download my app due to the fact that it is featured in the top 30 in the productivity section of the android market with out realising that it is targeted at Irish users for Irish lotto results. I'll have a look at the UK lotto website and see if that may be something to incorporate in to the next iteration of that project.

Lack of progress

I've had a bit of a lack of progress with any updates of the lotto checker app because I've been busy with work and floods and I also bought the F12011 game which is awesome. I doubt I'll get much done this weekend either, between working late and partying hard for Halloween but as soon as I get a chande next week, I'll try finish debugging ahd testing the euro millions and all or nothing ticket chrcker. In other news the total number of Downloads surpassed 800 today!

Horrible week in motorsport.

This week was a horrible week for motorsport with the death of Dan Wheldon last weekend annd this weekend the death of Marco Simoncelli. There were also three deaths at the Isle of Man TT this year including Irish racer Derek Brien. Also this year we saw the release of the film 'Senna', a film about the life and death about the legendary Ayrton Senna. This was a stark reminder of how dangerous motor sport is and I think that following this weekend a lot of the formula 1 drivers will be on edge at the introduction of the latest circuit in the formula 1 calendar in India. Let's hope for a safe end to the season and let's look forward to the progression of saftey in motorsport and motoring across the board

Beautiful day for coding!

Getting started

Now that I've decided on what my first project for this blog is going to be it's time to get down to business. As I have never worked with android before, the first step is to actually read some of the documentation, of which there is plenty of. From what I've seen before it's quite similar to J2ME in the sense that there's a bit of boiler plate code that's bare minimum for setting up the graphics device and appending stuff to it. I don't think it's going to be too difficult to learn!

In terms of the IDE, I'll be using Eclipse. So far, I've downloaded the Android SDK and I've installed the ADT Plugin for Eclipse, which has now just been configured as of this moment! I'm going to spend the next couple of hours learning the basics of the framework before I start up on designing how this ap will function, at which point ill draw up a few class diagrams and do a few pretty flow charts and stuff.

First post

Hi and welcome to my new blog! Ironically, I have never been really that interested in blogging before, nor am I now. I find the whole process a bit tedious, however I was watching the film "The Social Network" the other day and in that film Mark Zuckerburg was keeping a semi personal/development blog which he used as a mirror for reflecting upon ideas he had at the time which in turn aided him in implementing these ideas in to reality. Don't get me wrong, I'd highly doubt anything as big as Facebook will come of this blog but since I am constantly coming up with ideas for mobile aps, websites and other bits of technology that I never actually get around to doing anything about or else I start but never finish.

The purpose of this blog will be as a tool to aid me in recording, designing and developing these ideas. It is also my hope is that this blog will be keep me motivated as I learn to use new technology such as the android SDK. I'm not sure how often I'm going to update this blog, but I'll do my best to keep it quite frequent and semi-interesting.