Anonsage. Think. Do. Learn.: January 2015

2015-01-18

Level Up - Blogger: How to add formatted code to post (with highlighting)

In many of my posts, I like to add code snippets. Blogger doesn't have good native support for displaying code with syntax and line highlighting, so I found a way to add that feature using GitHub Gists and gist-embed project on GitHub.

The following steps can mostly be used with any blog.

Step 1: Include jQuery and gist-embed within your header tags.

<head>
  ...
  <script type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gist-embed/2.0/gist-embed.min.js"></script>
</head>

Step 2: Add a code element to where you want your Gist code to appear.

<code data-gist-id=""></code>

Example:

Source:

<code data-gist-file="PrimeNumbers.cpp" data-gist-hide-footer="true"
   data-gist-highlight-line="9,12,35-42" data-gist-id="5789439"></code>

Nice features also included, but not shown above:

Ability to show GitHub footer
Remove line numbers
Load multiple files from a Gist
Load a signal file from a Gist
Show only certain lines from a file

This article was mainly written for myself in the future, but I hope others can benefit from it, as well.

Links:

~ Danial Goodwin ~

My Android Apps | My Windows Phone Apps | My Developer Blog

2015-01-17

Level Up - Android Dev: How to get started with AndroidAnnotations (easy) (and build Chuck Norris app)

AndroidAnnotations is an open source framework for Android. Basically, you provide Java annotations for things, and the framework will auto-generate the necessary boilerplate code so you don't have to write it yourself. Runs at compile-time! (Read: No reflection or startup time impact) And, there's a lot of code AndroidAnnotations saves you from writing manually.

For example, want to run something in a background thread? Annotate the method with `@Background`. Want to run something in the main/UI thread? (rub some bacon on it) Annotate the method with `@UiThread`.

In this article, I provide a quick walkthrough for creating a very simple Chuck Norris facts app. I'll assume that you already have basic Android knowledge (and using Android Studio + Gradle). Then, at the end, I'll explain in more details some issues/gotchas I ran into while using AndroidAnnotations for the first time, and mention other goodies.

Getting started..