I will be away for a week, fighting with snowy roads in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Germany (the actual route is secret). Why? Duty calls.. um, company duty actually. We’re testing the new multimedia platform for a well-known German car manufacturer (actually more within the same group). I’m not gonna tell you the name, but I can give some hints:
- one of the brands was founded before WW II by some bad guys
- another of the brands has 4 interconnected rings
- another is Czech
- the last (not least) is Latin and likes fighting with bulls.

Now guess which group is it.

Anyway, I will have some updates for Power Schedule when I get back – UI rework, more flexible schedule and 1 or 2 other things I can’t talk about (competition ).

See you in a week. Or wait, I might have some WiFi in the hotels.

I’m not actually talking about the palm tree. I really mean Cocos2D, which is a well known 2D graphics engine, made famous by some iPhone games (see here for a list).
I recently started playing with it, well, with one of its variants: cocos2d-x. This port has taken the developers by storm, because it’s cross-platform. It can run on both Android and iOS, and the progress is quite amazing. More than this, it’s written in C++ . Which means guys like me, who really are shocked by Objective-C’s “unnatural” syntax, feel right at home .

So the fun stuff is (for geeks anyway), I can start Visual Studio, build the project, run it in Windows… Fire up Eclipse, build it for Android and run it on my HTC Desire… then start the *cough* Hackintosh *cough* and recompile everything for iOS… and run in the iPhone emulator (I don’t have an iStuff). Also it supports another platform (uphone), developed by China Unicom, a telecom company.

Anyway, it seems the guys behind the engine itself are a few engineers from China Unicom. So if the project has some funding, it may become the next best thing for mobile game development. Who knows, they may even add support for Windows Phone 7 at some point (although I doubt it now, since we can’t use C++ on it… at least not yet).

So for those interested, yes, I’m also working on a (secret) game

It seems the Microsoft Xbox Kinect hacks never stop. Getting it to work with an Android device, altough, only a proof of concept, seems to be very promising. I’m not sure what useful idea may come out of this, but anyhow, quite cool. Any of you have any thoughts?
Original story here.

HTC is busy these days at Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona. They just launched their first tablet and a series of new smartphones… some which feature a dedicated “Facebook” key. I’m sure people waste too much time on existing devices with Sense, until they get to open Facebook. Therefore, the need for a special key.
See more here and here

On a side note, Power Schedule has reached 500 downloads – not so bad for my first app (but these Market stats update so slowly – c’mon Google). Anyhow, I plan to release an update these days (1.2) – it’s mainly some UI improvements, to make it more intuitive for new users. If anyone can help with translations in other languages, I would appreciate it. Just drop me a message.

It seems what many anticipated was true – Windows Phone will become Nokia’s main Smartphone platform. It makes sense for Microsoft, as Nokia is the largest mobile phone manufacturer – and well known in Europe (not so much in the US). I guess Nokia wasn’t doing so well, they needed this partnership. After many years developing for Windows Mobile (now Phone), I lost some faith in the platform. Hopefully this will be a breath o fresh air, and an opportunity for Microsoft to make their revamped OS popular again. I may also give it another chance as well.
Read the whole story at Engadget.

I just updated Power Schedule to 1.1. I realized some people don’t want their phone turned off during the night, for example, but also don’t want to be disturbed by its ringing also. So the keep your “missed calls” AND your sleep undisturbed, I added the Ring Profile schedule as well.

Check your updates in the Market.

I just uploaded a fixed version – I got 2 crash reports from two users. It seems some Androids have different permission requirements – for example for setting the WiFi mode. So I had to add this one, and also the phone state permission. The 2nd one was my fault: it crashed when disabling all 4 schedule items (on, off, both for weekdays and weekends). Sorry for that

So hit your update button in market and please allow the new permissions.

You take a sick leave for 2 days. You get back to work and wish you didn’t. Exactly what happened to me this morning. So I can’t enjoy fully the fact that my Android Market stats have finally updated . So now there are 200 people using my app.
Thank you very much. I would appreciate it if you could also rate it

I just updated Power Schedule to 1.0.1. The displayed schedule is now activated, when you open the “Phone & Bluetooth” and “Wireless” settings (this fixed a small bug for users seeing the times displayed, without any action being performed at the specified times). Check the app page for download details.

Working on Power Schedule, I wanted to make a short help file, with some formatting. It seems there were several ways of doing this, but I chose to include an embedded HTML file into my application. It seemed easier to just edit an HTML file in an editor.
So let’s get started…

• first, embed an html file in the app resources. For this, create the “raw” subfolder in “res” folder and add your HTML formatted file:
  

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