All posts filed under: Software Engineering

arcadiaCharts public alpha released

The wait has come to an end and it’s quite a relief to finally be able to write about (and promote) something I’ve been involved in my spare time, mainly in 2009 and partly in 2010 as well. In December 2008 I had the pleasure to meet members of the management board of element5, one of the world’s largest outsourcing partners for the software industry, who were just kicking off a new little project: a charting library for JavaScript and Java. My colleague Oliver created the GWT Canvas project which was used for the rendering and I designed most of the project architecture and laid grounds for the available chart types. Unfortunately I had to reduce my involvement in late 2009 due to other personal projects and more responsibilities in my day job and made way for Joern and Andreas as the current main developers, but I’m still part of the development team and a little proud to see the first alpha come to light. The first public release is an alpha version for testing …

Android Application Development Tips: Pull screenshot with ADB

For some reason, pulling screenshots in the DDMS view in Eclipse doesn’t always work. In that case, the following calls became handy (tested with HTC Hero): adb pull /dev/graphics/fb0 fb0 dd bs=1920 count=800 if=fb0 of=fb0b ffmpeg -vframes 1 -vcodec rawvideo -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb565 -s 320×480 -i fb0 -f image2 -vcodec png image.png More examples available at the source.

Android Application Development Tips: ADB server didn't ACK

If you’re working on Windows and have HTC Sync installed, you may run into this error message. I hardly develop under Windows anymore, but since the Android plugin was a little buggy on OSX, I had to. This message drove me nuts and I did a little research: with netstat -o I could see which process ID was occupying the port and with Process Explorer I could see that HTC Sync itself was the culprit. I killed it but this didn’t help until I hindered it completely from auto-starting and restarted my machine afterwards.