Mark Fayngersh

software engineer @quartethealth; previously @crowdtwist; fooled around a bit @mit

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ok glass, develop

If you are a developer looking to get started creating native apps for Google Glass, I hope you find this guide helpful. XE 16 was recently released with an updated version of the GDK, which we will be using to create Weather Report.

Weather Report is a very basic weather app that will display and read aloud the weather for a given city. We will also write some unit tests for components that interact with third-party APIs. The project is open source and available on GitHub.


IDE / Project Setup

First, we must setup our development environment. I recommend using IntelliJ IDEA 13, which features Gradle integration and many other things that simplify development and deployment of Android / Glass apps.

Let’s create a new Android Module with Gradle:

Screenshot 2014-04-13 18.29.44.png

We’ll want to specify API 19 as the Target SDK and Glass Development Kit Preview as the Compile with:

Screenshot 2014-04-19 12.48.57.png

You will need to install Android...

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MFWalkthrough: A Container View Controller for iOS

The iOS Developer Library has an excellent article on creating custom container view controllers, so I won’t go too much into detail on that. This post will mainly focus on MFWalkthrough, an iOS library I created to simplify the process of sequentially stepping through view controllers.

Consider the use case of gathering information from a user, such as personal data during registration. If the amount of data you’re gathering is relatively small, you may usually get away with placing all inputs in a single view, such as the UITableView form pattern. There are, however, scenarios where it makes to split up the data gathering process across multiple views. Maybe there’s a sequential order to the information you’re gathering with some data depending on other data being valid. Or maybe you have large UI elements that require more space. This is where MFWalkthrough comes in.

MFWalkthrough...

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Temporary Obsessions

Life in short bursts of excitement

My life can essentially be reduced to a series of temporary obsessions.

Some last for hours such as a new study in cognitive neuroscience I just learned about from a TED talk. Others may last for years, like web development and photography. But that’s really all that they are, obsessions. Nothing more, nothing less.

hob·by — An activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.

Regularly is too consistent for me. I enjoy reading, especially metaphysics and crime thrillers, but I don’t do it regularly. Even if I could make some time to read everyday, which I probably can, I wouldn’t. Why? Because I would probably be obsessing over some Wikipedia article or GitHub project.

If I pick up a book, I will only continue reading it regularly if I am obsessed with it, and I could be switched off from one obsession to another.

I have not been...

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