Just to follow up on my last post about embedding Google Maps into your Android application (this part is kind of anti-climatic). So, by now you’ve signed your application. This is the “hardest” (i.e. busiest part) of the whole process. The next part, getting your Goggle apiKey, is the easy part. First you need to get the MD5 fingerprint of your keystore: keytool -list -alias androiddebugkey -keystore <path_to_debug_keystore>.keystore -storepass android -keypass android Once that is done, you and register for a Google Maps API key.

Thanks to all who attended my “Induction into the Android Army” talk this afternoon at the monthly Edmonton Java User’s Group meeting.  I’d say it was a good turn out, especially when one considers that this is only the second monthly meeting for EJUG.  It was a pretty basic talk, and didn’t dive to deeply into the “fun” Android stuff.  If anybody from EJUG wants a follow up presentation that’s a bit more in depth, give a shout out on the EJUG mailing list.

Just a heads up for those interested:  On Tuesday, June 15th the Edmonton Java User’s Group is having it’s monthly meeting at noon at the Canadian Western Bank Building.  The speaker is none other than yours truly.  I’ll be giving a brief introduction to application development to Android, using my trusty G1 and IntelliJ. It’s free to attend, so stop by if you’re so inclined.

  You have to love spring time in Alberta.  The tulips have such a contrast against the snow at 21:30 on a Saturday evening:

Gotta love companies that "get it". Late last night I was hacking away on some Android stuff using IntelliJ 9.0.2 (on Ubuntu 10.04). For reasons unknown to me, none of my breakpoints seemed to be working. In fact, IntelliJ just didn't seem to be working. I narrowed it down to the breakpoints I was setting - it seemed that every time the breakpoints were being hit. I managed to narrow it down to this error: [ 166030] ERROR - lij.

I just uploaded an update to HistoricalBuildings.  The list of historical buildings used to be sorted alphabetically, by name.  Now they are sorted by the distance from your current location (assuming the GPS can figure that out).

Well, for the brave, criminally insane, curious, or otherwise bored I have a alpha version of Historical Buildings – download the APK if you want to try it out.  This is just, at this time, the application just shows a simple list of historical buildings in Edmonton (according to the City of Edmonton's Open Data Catalogue).  Click on a building, and it will show you on Google Maps where the building is in the city.

Thanks to the MapView, it’s drop dead easy to put Google Maps into your application.  There are lots of posts out there how to do it.  Interestingly (to me anyway), when I did a quick search of the Android developers mailing list, I was surprised to see that a lot of people had the same problem:  basically, when you look at your MapView, you end up with a grid of white squares.

I guess I forgot to mention this:  On April 1, 2010, I received an e-mail from Microsoft that my MVP in C# was renewed for the third year.  This makes me a happy, because with Resharper 5 (and therefore Visual Studio 2010) and Windows Mobile 7, I’m hoping that this will be an exciting year for the .NET crowd.  Well, okay, perhaps I didn’t forget.  Given that it was April 1st when I got the e-mail, I like to give things a few days to settle down.

Not that long ago, the City of Edmonton announced it's Open Data Catalogue. I noticed that one of the data catalogues was a list of historical buildings in the city. Yeah, I know that some people in other cities might consider this a pretty weak list. I mean, the oldest building in Edmonton isn’t even 150 years old. I’d wager that some parts of the world consider 150 year old buildings to be “new construction”.