Al1UK.com » Personal

School Reunion

Al — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:41:14 +0000

Went to one today, was great to see some old faces again \o/

Car insurance prices, wtf!?

Al — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:29:45 +0000

Telegraph: Car insurance premiums up a record 20pc

No wonder my insurance company wants to raise my premiums by another £25 a month, even after being a customer for 3 years and having no claims! Lame, real lame.

Found work – finally!

Al — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:45:01 +0000

So after 8 months of post graduate unemployment (excluding my 1.5 month holiday ), I finally found work, yay. Working within a multinational company in their IT department.

Free Nexus One – courtesy of Google

Al — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:01:54 +0000

Received my free N1 from Google today, as part of the device seeding program. Phone is sweet but I don’t think I can survive with only a soft keyboard so I’ll keep my G1 on me for now… Also, AndChat really flies on the N1 compared to the G1. Looking forward to solving the problems specific to 2.1 that I’ve never been able to reproduce on the emulator but users keep contacting me about.

Something everyone should read

Al — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:26:37 +0000

Read it now! http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

Now reading….

Al — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:00:21 +0000

Shadow of Power by Steve Martini. Really great book, gonna read more stuff from this author.

Holiday Snaps!

Al — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:34:50 +0000

I haz dem!

AndroidIRC Multiserver screenshots

Al — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:52:12 +0000

I’ve been doing some work on getting AndroidIRC to support multiple servers and have made good progress. It’s not fully usable at the moment but I decided to put some screenshots up of the work in progress.

The chatwindow GUI hasn’t been fully implemented yet, I’ll put up a mockup that was done for me showing what I eventually want it to look like a bit later.

As usual, feedback is appreciated.

On a side note, I’m well into my exam period, wish me luck

AndroidIRC for G1 released!

Al — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:40:23 +0000

Phew! I never knew coding such a small app could take so long, but I’ve finally managed to fix the really big bugs and make it run as a service. Anyway, head over to AndroidIRC.net for the file and more info.

Bug reports, feedback and/or constructive criticism welcome (via email preferred).

Developing for Android

Al — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:05:33 +0000

When the Android SDK was first released, I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then came time for me to to choose my final year project for Uni. My original choice was snagged by someone else, so I had to make a quick decision, the deadline for choosing the project was the next day.

I had been thinking, before Uni started again, about how it would be a good idea for me to write my own apps for Android, after all, the apps could be written in Java which was something I knew. The app I had in mind was an IRC client for the phone. (Yes, I am an IRC addict :/).

So, sitting in the Uni computer room, I decided I would make an IRC app for Android as a final year project.

I got started straight away, the SDK and the Android system was completely new to me, I’d never even bothered to look up anything about it. The initial weeks were very tough, I didn’t understand anything and was confused as hell even after reading the docs.

But now, I’m making good progress The app is coming along nicely; the toughest part is creating a parser, which is taking longer then expected. But my GUI and main interaction screen seem to working pretty well so far. I had to make a few design changes though, the idea to use tabs for channels just didn’t work out, mainly before working with dynamic content and tabs was cumbersome.

Anyway, I managed to work around that problem and load of others, so wish me luck to making a usable app \o/

P.S, leave a comment telling me what type of things you would expect to find in an IRC app for a phone…..