Monthly Archives: February 2010

How to display borders in Table Layouts

Posted on February 19, 2010 | 18 Comments

According to the Android developer guide, border lines are not displayed for table layouts. However, often you will find the need to do things such as having vertical separators between table cells and borders around table rows. There are two different methods that I can think of to achieve this. Continue reading →

→ 18 Comments

Posted in Android, Guides

Tagged , , , , ,

Setting up MMS, GPRS and 3G with 2Degrees (NZ) on Android phones

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 54 Comments

I am with 2degrees, a local mobile operator in New Zealand. However, they do not provide clear cut instructions on setting up mobile internet (either 3G or GPRS) and MMS on smart-phones. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to setup MMS and Internet on your Android phone. The settings are tested on HTC Hero (with Android 1.5 HTC ROM) and work flawlessly. I can send and receive MMS messages without any problem. Browsing is extremely painful with GPRS, so I only tested GPRS using the gmail app.

Last Updated: 2012/06/05 to add an extra step to get MMS/3G working.

Continue reading →

→ 54 Comments

Posted in General, Guides, Mobile

Tagged , , , , , ,

Debugging Android applications

Posted on February 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’ve been playing around with Google’s Android mobile operating system for the past month as part of a post-masters project I’m doing at the University of Auckland. Though there are tons of articles and tutorials to get things started at the official Android Developer Center, you can easily get lost when finding how to do some of the simplest of tasks.

Knowing how to debug your mobile applications is one of the fundamental things you should know as an Android (or any) developer. I use Eclipse IDE for development purposes, and the document simply states that I can view log messages from the “Log Cat” view. Few hours into development, I noticed that sometimes my log statements are not displayed in the Log Cat view at all.

In this article, I am giving a step-by-step guide on how to start debugging an Android application using the Eclipse IDE, along with how to write bebug statements and view them during run-time using the Log Cat view. Hopefully this guide will shave few hours off wondering around endless forums on the internet, trying to figure out how to get those log messages to show up!

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Android, Development

Tagged , , , ,