Hi to all 
If you have never been to Oxford or if you have really appreciated this beautiful city, you can find here some pics!
For all Nerds, I’ll back as soon as possible because in the last few months I had a lot of changements and I’m actually adjusting my #Android libraries.
If you have to come here in London for a huge bier or for an holiday you cannot miss to use that’s new App. Born to be simple, easy to use and funny, MyNextBus London by NotANum will allow you to search every bus in London!
After a minimal blue splash will have a list of all closest bus stops around you ordered by distance. If you tap on of those entry you’ll access to the sublist of all bus those are arriving or those will arrive in some minutes.
…that’s all! Simple! Fast… and without any complications when you are in a hurry!
This is the first version but we’ll definitely improve it with some new useful features!
P.S.: I’m pretty sure that in some weeks it’ll be available for the iOS platform too! 
Dec 23
This gallery contains 6 photos.
On the 1st of December I have left Italy and I have started a new life in London. For the first time in my life, I have really left my nest to fly only with my wings. It seems a simple thing but when you are used to a certain rhythm of life in a first […]
On 17th September I have taken part into WeddingSnap
project as Android consultant and developer. At first, I was so confused and astonished by the idea that a guest takes pictures with his phone at a wedding. But after a few days I have noticed that this is a great idea! Far from Italian traditions, catching pics socially is a great thing because it increases and amplifies the sense of friendship and closeness between people. In fact, if you consider that we are talking about unforgettable and precious moments you’ll certain understand that the bride and groom want all best things in their precious day.
15 years ago we were used to take pictures through simple cameras but now, in an era governed by most famous social networks and technologies, we are using smartphones more and more. WeddingSnap tries to collect these special moments merging wedding’s pictures into shared album, avoiding useless tricks to share pics between guests. Through this idea all people involved in a wedding can take and share a lot of photo shoots without caring of number limits and distribuition of them.
In just one month the Android app is grown quickly, giving to this project a great contribuition. In particular, if you decide to take a look on GooglePlay, you’ll find these new features:
If you aren’t ready for your first, second,….. wedding, give a look at ForeverSnap! You aren’t forced to use a wedding app if you only want to collect other events pics
In the last two days I have participated for FactoryMind at Windows Developer Conference in Milan. As an amazing android developer I have heard carefully all the news proposed by speakers. In my opinion every kind of development technology has its own charm and curiosity and I believe that the new Windows8 will offer to public and developers a new way of think.
Inspired by many active technologies from Apple, Android, Google, (Old) Windows,… this new OS tries to summarize social and canonical schema into a multi-platform operating system granting the maximum experience to users. Far from old styles Windows8 promises to integrate every device in the most convenient manner for the user.
At this conference I have participated at this at these technical talks:
That’s all for this time
This is not an IOC to Microsoft world but a new way of think that travels hand by hand with my other one
Simone
On 26th September I have obtained my first bachelor degree. This milestone has signed the end (for the moment) of my student career because next month I’ll start my work one at FactoryMind.
There are some moments during your life in which you have to make a choice and this is my new bet for coming months.
For the moment enjoy my bachelor pictures
FB on NASDAQ
The title is just a provocation because it’s not only referred to Facebook but to all those kinds of social networks which are similar to it. In particular I’m referring to all social networks which are based on the concepts of groups and closures. If you think just a few moments to the reasons that have led you to join them you’ll find a strange need to spy people which live near you. Maybe I’m exaggerating but how many times have you looked at some pictures of your neighbour or your classmate or your workmate without knowing him/her? I really don’t believe that at least one time you don’t have done it. Features like people tagging, friends tips,… have helped you to perform these kind of actions in a simply way without thinking of it. Sometimes it’s very easy to hide ourself behind a screen to view many different contents but unfortunately you end up to use these social networks only to inspect contents and other lives without contributing to the real sense of Social.
In my opinion social networks like Facebook, Google+,… will not have much future because they only move the concept of friendship circles into them without offering features related to real needs of people. They work only as people’s boxes leaving them the possibility to choose what kind of box to create into them: and this is the failure of the system. In this way they split two times their user base loosing great opportunities.
I think that we can consider some important notices/considerations of the recent moments to prove that this kind of social manner will be a complete failure:
In the last month Facebook has acquired the “new” social platform Instagram. Someone have said “this is a moved to bring the Mark Zuckerberg creation to the Chinese world” but in my opinion it’s is an investment in a network that can really bring the concept of social to the extreme level. On Instagram you receive many good feedbacks on your photos without reducing your perspectives only to small boxes and increasing your sense of satisfaction. If you think to the American NASDAQ, Facebook is entered with a great value for every stock quote but loosing many points in just some days. Actually its value is increased (3.22%) but I think that in the next month it will decrease again. The Instagram purchase will be a good choice to improve Facebook service and at the same time the interst of many user. On the other hand if you consider Big G with its social network you’ll find a service similar to Facebook but that force you to migrate to another platform. This is boring and I don’t believe that it’ll be massively used. I have to admit that Google+ is very well integrated with other Google services but it’s not enough to be innovative. So if you consider other social platform like Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, Grooveshark… you have to understand that their power states into a single great box, not in just many small realities, and that they work in a single field that involves thousand and thousand of people. I hope this not seems cynical but this is what I am seeing in this Wide World Web.
As developer I think that all kind of applications and systems (except for low level ones) have to include and support social features, the most used of the moment, because in this way they can interact with an immense user base, granting themself more visibility and popularity.
What do you think? Am I a black dolly that thinks only strange things? 
In this tutorial we’ll talk some aspects that involves a mobile developer in many situations. In particular we’ll deepen concepts like threads (in particular AsyncTasks) and JSON parsing through Google GSON.
Before you start, take a look at:
Now you are ready to perform this simple steps:
In this way you’ll view if your JSON is valid and how it’s structured.
After that you need to create (there’s mine ) an android project in which you add into AndroidManifest.xml the internet permission and an Activity that’ll be your ListActivity implementation. It’s important to that because our application uses an Internet connection to contact Twitter servers. After that you need to prepare your xml layouts and resources: you’ll find them into res folder.
Now there is the core of your application that it’s related to code implementation and in particular to the AsyncTaskActivity and HTTPUtil that you can read in the attached project.
Into your ListActivity implementation to avoid to stop your main UI Thread we’ll implement the data fetching into a background Thread. That’s not a good practise but a must that grants to user a good experience and to avoid “Your application has unexpectedly…. bla bla”. Hence, I have provide an implementation of AsyncTask that allows you to perform into the background the following operations:
In fact all these operations are performed into doInBackground(….) method. All those updates those involves UI, in our case list refresh, are done in the UI thread and for that are done in onPostExecute(…). Pay attention that if you perform these actions out of your main Thread you get a fatal error and your app crashes relentlessly. If you try this tutorial on your mobile phone or into emulator you’ll obtain the screens that you can see in the SlideShow.
The solution that I have provided is very simple and there are other mechanism that connected to data persistance grants to user a better UE (user-experience).
I hope that this tutorial will be very helpful,
Simone
Professional Android 4 Application Development
I have just finished this wonderful technical book about android programming and I think that can be a good idea sharing personal my impressions with you.
In the past two years I have red some Italian books written by Massimo Carli, finding them useful for a base approach. Growing my thirst for knowledge I have encountered Reto‘s work that in my opinion offers a more complete and wider view about this powerful platform.
The book is structured in 19 chapters those present to you a deep overview on all platform features. The most important feature that I have found particularly interesting is the attention provided by the author in teaching step by step through examples. This is a very important point that many teachers and writers forget when they have to write a book because they think that’s better talking in a smoky enchanted way than educate easily and directly the readers.
The author during these chapters provide a full set of examples, related in most of case to an app that reports earth quakes, that grows in page by page involving features, concepts and abstractions like:
In just 21,84€, a very competitive price for the contents, you can purchase an ebook that’s too intuitive and expressive for new developers but at the same time for the more expert ones. I have personally bought my ebook on Amazon but if you prefer you can find it on other stores like Wrox or directly in Google Play.
See you next time, maybe with a tutorial
Simone
