HelloTextToSpeech

Introduction

In today's session I will try to teach you how to add Text-to-speech support in your apps. What are we creating today? We will be creating a portable and light TextToSpeechManager class that will be easy to add to your projects. Ever since I held the public talk at the April Android Developer Meetup on this topic I wanted to do a follow up in a form of a blog. The full code source can be found on my github, feel free to fork it and play around with it. The slides from the presentation can be found here.

Text-To-Speech (TTS) also known as "speech synthesis" which enables your android device to "speak" the text that you give it. It supports a wide range of languages, but not all Android devices have them.

Android device offline in Android Studio

Hello there,

long time no write. This is my first post for the year 2016 and this one was a hair puller. My Nexus 7 almost ended up out the window.

The problem is that the Android Studio reports your connected device as being offline and you are not able to debug the app you are developing, and that can be frustrating.

You have done it all:

• You have installed the latest usb drivers on your device,
• Restarted the adb (the infamous kill-server command)
• Turned off and back on the USB debugging
• Restarted Android studio
• Rebooted the device
• Rebooted the computer

None of the above worked for me, as it turns out I had to do the following. On your android device go to the Developer options -> Revoke USB debugging authorizations.  After that I reconnected the android device and everything magically worked.

As a side note, I haven't use that device in a while. I think I had 2 updates to Android Studio in the meantime. Maybe that is why it had problems with debugging, some stale data stuck in the cache somewhere.

Hope it saves you some time and nerves,

Until next time,

Take care

Anchorman

Extra, Extra, read all about it!

I would like to present to you Anchorman. My first personal Android project that I managed to finish. I don't know about you, but for me this took a lot of willpower, love, time, sweat and endurance to get to this point. A bit of advice for newbies at this point: First step is always the hardest and the scariest. At the same time, I am happy and grateful now I've made that step and learned a lot along the way. It will only get easier from now on. Enough about my rant, that is not what you are here for :)

What is Anchorman you ask? Anchorman is a Text-To-Speech news reader app. It delivers you the latest news on the go. For ease of use you have a variety of different news categories from GoogleNews. At the tip of your finger you have access to sports, tech, world, entertainment news and etc.

If that is too cool for you, you have an option of entering a custom URL of an article and anchorman will give its best to read it. Don't worry, you have the share link option, so you can share that article with all your friends and family, and also you can load that webpage to your phone's browser from the app.

Programming/Design in this project was done by yours truly and Graphic Design was done by a good friend of mine Vladimir Radovic 

I wanted this app to have a mascot and Vladimir kicked some booty and created this lovable character. Now when I think about it, we still haven't given him a name, so if you have any ideas in the meantime, use the comment section bellow.

This is a free version of the app, and I have a lot of ideas prepared for this project if it attracts enough interest.

You can download the app from the GooglePlay store at : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=markomarks.core.anchorman

If you have the time and will, download the app, take it for a spin, comment it and give it a 5-star rating *wink* *wink*.

Introduction

Hello ladies and gentleman and welcome to my first post in the 'My Projects' section. The main idea here is to tell you a bit about the projects I have done. I won't be going into technical details too much, just the general description. The reason for that is that I would like to keep some secrets to myself *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*.

If you have some questions, or you would like to know more about the project, use the comment section, send me a personal message or scream on from the top of the hill, whatever you want to do is fine with me.

Peace!

Android: Fatal signal 11

Hello there guys,
Don't blink, this will be a quickie :)

I started panicking when I got this exception "Android Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at ... (code=1)" in the Eclipse environment.

The description in the LogCat is pretty vague and scary, and I lost a lot of time backtracking my steps. The solution to this problem for me was rather simple. The png image I have put in the project was too big.

I have used an image with a 3000x3000 resolution. In the IDE everything looked and behaved ok, but when you were loading it onto your device (my wrinkly Samsung Galaxy S II) it gave that exception.

Oh, and I didn't need an image that big, 96x96 was what I was going for, but stupid me forgot to re-size it. What is the resolution/memory threshold of an image? I don't know, but be wary when using big images in your projects.

Honestly, I would have never guessed that a simple image was the problem. I hope you found this useful and don't go through the torture I did.

Be careful crossing the street,
Until next time,

Spatial Data Clustering with C#

Howdy y'all, a big one from me today. Today we are dealing with spatial data clustering. There is a huge demand in these kind of techniques, especially for the clustering of geographical data. The problem is if you have, for example, a huge number of products that you want to display on the map, you would probably run into the problem of rendering those data. On one hand, the problem of speed of fetching the data, and secondly, if the pins are too close to each other it would be hard to interact with a specific pin. In both cases you would need to shrink the data that is received. The most logical solution would be grouping of the data that are geographically close enough to each other into one object that contains combined information.

MVC Editor Template Checklist

Howdy y'all.

Today's topic is are the MVC Editor templates. I won't be going in what they are and what do they do now, this will be just a checklist to remind you if you have done everything you should, before freaking out why don't they work, bind correctly, post null and etc.

Editor templates on small projects can work OK, but on a larger scale project they can cause some serious headaches. If anyone notices that I missed something or maybe wrong please let me know in the comment section bellow.

asp.net pass int list to a controller

Howdy guys, another rainy day in Belgrade and I've decided to share some of the last weeks thoughts with you guys and girls. This one is useful have to say, considering the waste of time the problem can cause.

So, without further due, let's dig into that.

Situation is quite simple, we need to redirect to another page or a controller and we need to pass an int list to it as an parameter.

n-ary Tree structure: implementation and children insertion to a node

Hello and good day :)

Today I will be dealing with an interesting topic to me. N-ary trees. What I usually find on the web is related to binary trees and I was interested in n-ary tree for my own side project and decided to make my own implementation of it. If you don't like it or would like to tweak it just scream and shout in the comment section bellow and I will do something about it, maybe ;)

Object to object list

Hello, how are you doing this day?
This will be a simple and a short one, but wanted to put this on my blog, because I am catching myself searching online for this thing from time to time. So, for my sake I have put it on here :)
The thing is we have an object but the method we are sending it to requires a list of objects of the same type.