I recently implemented the server side of a system to send notifications to iOS apps through APNS. This was extremely easy to implement and opened my eyes to the benefits of having a persistent streaming connection to Apple's servers. That is to say my backend is a constantly

Recently I was approached by a buyer based in China interested in purchasing one of the domain names owned by Double Negative. After a prolonged back and forth we agreed on a sales price and agreed to complete the transaction through an Escrow service. Why not Escrow.com? The transaction

Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) The Don't Repeat Yourself principle is one of the most important concepts that a software engineer has in his/her arsenal (in my opinion). I previously worked on a legacy PHP project whereby a complete disregard for DRY has resulted in a

Whilst clever solutions to complex problems are always interesting and insightful, sometimes the answer is a lot more simple. When gearing up to release our first app to the Google Play store we engaged in some real world testing. The results were generally positive but it made apparent one large

Since version 17 of the Android API it has been possible to nest fragments within your applications. Using the support library that the Android team provide, you can utilize this functionality from version 11 onwards. There is however a bemusing issue in the latest versions of the support library which

Whilst I am aware of, and appreciative of the merits of both Roboguice and Dagger, I felt that they were not suitable for what I had initially intended to be a simple application. That is not to say that they are complex or difficult to use but rather I didn&

I was attempting to test a method which sets a photo inside an ImageView using Picasso when I stumbled upon an error. The error outputted to logcat was "Method call should happen from the main thread". It was thrown by Picasso, and it was causing my test to

This post was initially entitled "Android fragments - the important stuff". It will hopefully provide an overview of the less obvious things associated with utilizing fragments in Android. What is the difference between attach/add and detach/remove? Detaching a fragment essentially dissociates a fragment from its activity.

In the process of building an application for Android I encountered an interesting requirement with a non-trivial solution. I wanted to implement horizontally scrollable 'pages' in such a way that when the user then added a new item, a new page would be added at the start. The

Over the last couple of days I have been investigating the pull to refresh paradigm, and its possible implementation in an Android app. A quick Google search produces this library from Chris Banes, and this fork from Naver Communications. They are however for my use cases too complex and not

For one of my web based projects I needed to acquire some data. Data in the modern day and age is often the most valuable asset of a company... it got me thinking. The Royal Mail here in the UK offer a Postcode Address File (PAF) to any entity who

I was implementing some functionality utilizing the Twitter API and found the documentation to be extremely lacking/unclear. Given that the oAuth protocol seems more complicated than it actually is, I thought I'd document some extra explanation to accompany Twitter's sign in implementation docs. 3 Legged