Mike Griffiths

I recently had the pleasure of having a tinker with the Google Android SDK. At first I was extremely impressed at how well the whole thing had been put together. There is a whole array of developer tools, from the very realistic and thorough emulator to the activity logger and the Eclipse plug-in.

I quickly turned from an impressed Mike to a very frutrated Mike. It seems Google’s example code on the ‘Hello Views’ section of the SDK web site is completely flawed. It simply will not compile. Of course, I didn’t expect the code to be wrong, so I didn’t even attempt to hunt round for a solution, I instead blamed Eclipse for being unreliable and thought it had picked on me and decided not to allow me to compile any applications, for no particular reason.

One I got around that issue I found the framework to be reliable and very developer-friendly. I have had some experiences with the iPhone SDK which I do not rate. Apple’s version is bloated and I found it to be quite sluggish. Apple being Apple it wouldn’t be complete without a huge price tag too, charging developers a licence fee for the SDK and then a further fee for publishing the application and then a royalty fee for every instance of the actual app that gets downloaded. Just out of principle I decided to not develop my application on the iPhone. Not to mention the fact that you must use Apple’s own language to develop in.

Enough of an Apple rant anyway. You can built your Android apps in the universal language of Java, which makes everyones life much easier with the tons of IDEs, forums and code snippets out there to use, not to mention a massive user base. There’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing a sharp rise in the amount of apps available for Android in the near future as more and more devices come on the market and more people become frustrated with the iPhone and it’s price tag.

I’ll be creating a few applications over the coming weeks and will post my findings.

Ever heard of Geocities? Most web savvy people have. Well it’s parent company, Yahoo have decided to pull the plug on Geocities and tomorrow (26th October) Geocities will be gone forever and all web sites currently hosted on there will be deleted.

In the late 90’s and early 00’s Geocities was the first (and only for some) port-of-call for anyone looking to set up a web site in the cheapest and easiest way. It’s What You See is What You Get (WYSiWYG) designer tools was at the forefront of it’s technology at the time and made making web sites easy.

Yahoo itself will be deleting all of the content hosted on Geocities so, if like me, you created your first web presence on there then I suggest you try and remember your log in details and go grab the files. A few companies have been downloading copies of all files from Geocities for some time now, including Archive Team.

Onwards and upwards.

Last year I took part in the 2008 Liverpool Santa Dash for charity. I did the sponsored run with the guys from Reckless New Media, who were all dressed in rediculous santa outfits.

We’re all returning this year to try and earn some more money for charity and to try and beat our times from last year. To try and earn some extra cash we have decided to create a small web site to try and generate some traffic and get some extra sponsorship. We’ve also placed Google AdSense on the web site, all of the money from AdSense will be going to our selected charity.

Stay tuned for pictures and check out the web site below.

Liverpool Santa Dash