The creator of DroidDraw is certainly busy, for he published another tutorial concerning how-to in certain graphical aspects of Android.

This time, it’s about how Android widgets work. Be sure to read it, it’s literally a 2 minute read to knowing the deal with Android widgets, great summary.

I’ve mentioned droiddraw earlier in this blog.

Since then, the developer of the only gui building program for android at the moment has been quite busy, and been following “Release early, release often” cycles.

He’s also made a tutorial on how to use the gui builder, certainly worth your time!

I’m expecting a great deal from this gui builder in the near future, let’s all prepare ^^

The newest version of XFCE, a lightweight window manager for unix systems, was published. The version number is 4.4.2, and the main changelog contains bugfixes.

Full changelog is found here.

Downloads are available here.

Today I saw a post concerning about the seeing impaired people who could use android for the best, if only there was some sort of screen reader software running on Android. Something was said about not being able to implement that because of certain security reasons, but that probably referred to independent software reading what would be on the screen, next to that, the poster indicated that there was no speech synthesizer for Java (yet), which clearly pointed out that he was thinking of an independent program reading the content of another program.

I replied to that, and suggested festival – a text to speech framework, and that if there is some modification done to it, it would most likely be “androidified”. However, it’s high likely that software will be required to support it (The api), or another approach is to be taken (Kernel-height, which I think will prove quite difficult)

The discussion is found at google groups, more specific here.

As I was reading the digest of this point, I read there is another blog out there willing to become more into android, and putting together info about it.

The blog is found at http://www.wulf-pack.blogspot.com/ and I’m sure It’ll become really nice…

The I’m surprised actually today. To be honest I did not expect the Android OS would be this popular, certainly not this quick. I sure hoped to be amongst those who are actually writing future.

However, for those out there that can invest some time, there is a GUI design site, with the link to the source of the java applet available. It’s called DroidDraw and it’s looking pretty darn nice. It’s the only GUI design ide-like program I’ve met for the Android framework (if I may call it that way).

This GUI designer can save you a whole lot of time writing XML files to represent the GUI you want. OR it can help you understand the syntax of the used XML better. However you use it, it seems to be a very handy tool!

Be sure to check out www.droiddraw.org !!

As it is, I have found myself reading falavia.nl quite often these days. It’s the blog website of a friend of mine – and his girlfriend. It’s dutch however…

Anyhow, they post about everything, with very amusing stories in there.

So, to all your dutch-speaking people out there: falavia.nl !!

In recent events where I seem to be attracted to the Android development and all quirks around it, I’ve decided to regularly post some updates on that account. In light of that, I also decided to make a new subcategory of “programming” dedicated to the Android OS.

I hope it will all be for the best, RSS feeds for this category only are found here.

As people might know, there used to be a rumour about google working on a “gphone”. However, in reality this proved to be not a phone on its own, but an operating system working on many phones.

At this point android, the name of the phone os created by google, is still in beta stage, and developers have been encouraged to develop software for the android os (With a high price to the winner of some contest). Still, it’s very dark magic for most people (Including me to be fair).

However, I’m subscribed to the mailing list, and today popped op something interesting. Someone able to compile the android os from the source has made a small tutorial on how to do it, step by step.

This might prove handy for many people!!

http://honeypod.blogspot.com/2007/12/compile-android-kernel-from-source.html

In light of the recent python 3000 post I made here, I have been looking for some python-related stuff.

In my search for a good IDE, i stumbled upon the wingware ide, proclaimed to be the best. And I agree! The wingware ide has already helped me understand some python more, and thanks to it’s useful interface, I’m starting to get along with our friend python.

Now, as this ide is normally not free, I should point out that there is a completely free version which everyone can use, but for the price of less features (off course). It’s still nice, and usefull, but the personal (Or even the professional) version are way better. All the differences in features are listed here. And as you can clearly see, wing personal even is significantly better than the free (101) version. However, there are 30-day free trial versions available for the paid ones. Couldn’t hurt to try first!

As this ide is more towards the really professional python programmers, it does not come with a light price. As the professional version costs 179$, for 1 OS, per developer. The personal edition however seems to be well affordable by many, and certainly a coder, the price is (only) 35$, for 1 OS, per developer.

Bottom line: If you intent to pick up some python coding, there is one thing you need: The wingware IDE!! After 30 days you most certainly have learned sufficient python thanks to the handy interface, help, and everything around this ide. And after those 30 days, it’s highly recommended to buy a license. The personal version is fine for most needs.