Posts Tagged ‘Android’

Android application: Agricola Buddy

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Yesterday, I released an Android application on the Android Market; Agricola Buddy.

For months now, we’ve had regular games of the Agricola board game at work. It’s a real gem of a game, and in my opinion perfect for “thinkers” – like programmers usually are.

Scan to download

The application helps you with calculating the score for each player in the game, which is done at the end of each game. While far from a necessity when playing, it provided me with an opportunity to create and release an application of limited size and complexity.

You can find the application on the Android Market, just search for “Agricola Buddy” or scan the QR-code to the right.

In the future, I hope to add lots of cool features to it – a way to store results over time, submit to a webservice, easily share the results with others, occupation/minor improvement reference and so on. If you have an Android phone, give it a go :-)

Here are some screenshots:

Android emulator skin: Sony Ericsson X10 Mini

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Been a while since I made my Samsung Galaxy skin. Since then, a ton of Android phones have arrived and many of them with different resolutions than the “normal” HVGA.

A popular one in Europe is the X10 Mini, from Sony Ericsson which has a QVGA resolution.

When you are creating Android applications, you should make sure that it works well on various resolutions, which the emulator helps you with. However, the built in QVGA skin is rather ugly, so I decided to try and whip up a skin based on the X10 Mini. Here’s what I ended up with:

Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Android Skin

I quite like it, and it also works fairly well on low-resolution monitors, such as on netbooks (at least it does on mine). I zipped it up and put it up for download. To use it:

  1. Extract the zip file into your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder.
  2. Create a new AVD with the AVD Manager and select X10Mini from the skins dropdown.
  3. If you want to get as close to the X10 Mini software, use the 1.6 image (android-4, I believe).
  4. Enjoy!

Note: I forgot to include the hardware.ini file required for 1.6+. Should work better now :-)

Android emulator skin: Samsung Galaxy

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I’ve been developing some Android stuff lately, and finding it a real joy to work with.

It gets rather tiresome to look at the same fake phone all the time though, so I decided to take a break and see if I could create a skin based on the upcoming Samsung i7500 (I believe they’ve named it Galaxy now, at least in Germany). The screen position and such may not be spot on, but it has the right resolution at least. I mapped most of the buttons too, but the zones had to be cut off a little due to the emulator not supporting weird button shapes (afaik).

Should anyone be interested in downloading it, feel free to get it. Just extract this to your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder and you should be good to go. Run the emulator with the flag “-skin Galaxy” (or if you’re using Android 1.5 or upwards, just select Galaxy as your skin in the AVD Manager). Here’s a screenshot of how it looks in action:

Samsung Galaxy Android Emulator skin

Samsung Galaxy Android Emulator skin