Using Google Maps in your Android Applications – Part 3 [Adding Place Markers]

This tutorial was created using the Google Maps API v1 and as it is not possible to obtain a v1 key anymore this series of posts is pretty much obsolete. I’ve been looking at creating an updated set of tutorials and I’ll post them as soon as they are ready.

If you have been following along with Part 1 and Part 2 of this mini-series you should now have a basic Android application which displays your current location on a map. Not amazing functionality I’ll admit but the basis for many location based applications in the Android Market. What will make the application truly useful is the ability to add markers at specific locations, e.g. points of interest, cash machines, checkpoints etc.

Using Google Maps in your Android Applications – Part 2 [Showing Current Location]

This tutorial was created using the Google Maps API v1 and as it is not possible to obtain a v1 key anymore this series of posts is pretty much obsolete. I’ve been looking at creating an updated set of tutorials and I’ll post them as soon as they are ready.

In my last post I showed you how to create a basic Android application which would display a map and zoom in to a specific location, my home town. While the functionality was not what you could call awe-inspiring it does lay the foundations for most mapping applications and serves as a good starting point. You can download the code from Part 1 but you will need to insert your own Google Maps API key for it to display the maps.

In this installment I had intended to continue from where we left off last time and add the functionality required to display markers/pins on the map to indicate points of interest. There are however a couple of areas to cover and I didn’t want to end up writing a massive post to cover both – so I’m going to split this functionality into two parts; showing the current location and showing locations of points of interest.

Using Google Maps in your Android Applications – Part 1

This tutorial was created using the Google Maps API v1 and as it is not possible to obtain a v1 key anymore this series of posts is pretty much obsolete. I’ve been looking at creating an updated set of tutorials and I’ll post them as soon as they are ready.

I’m currently working on an Android application which displays points of interest on a map and allows the user to see additional details by tapping on the associated marker. This sounds like a straight forward requirement for an Android application and so you would have thought that there would be a wealth of resources on the web to guide a developer on his way – but that’s not been my experience.

Recovering deleted files on Fedora 15 using the photorec utility

So here is the scenario; I’d taken some photos of a special occasion and wanted to copy them to my usb key so that my girlfriend could take them to be printed. Simple stuff huh.? Well normally yes, but when I gave my girlfriend the usb key last time instead of finding just the handful of photos on there that she expected there were dozens of them displayed when she plugged it into the kiosk.

These were of course in the hidden .Trash folder on the device but I didn’t think to clear down the recycle bin. Well, I was not going to be caught out like that again so this time I deleted everything on the key, opened the Trash folder and clicked ‘Empty Trash’. Now all I had to do was drag and drop the photos from the camera and drop them onto the usb key. A fraction of a second too late I realised that I was not dropping the files into the usb key folder but into the trash instead!

Backing up and Restoring to Dropbox on Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS

In my previous couple of posts I’ve been configuring Dropbox on my Virtual Private server running a headless installation of Ubuntu 10.04. The main reason for this was to enable me to use it for storing backups without having to rely in the Dropbox Web API which has proven to be somewhat flaky – or at least that’s my experience. With the Dropbox daemon now installed, configured and running all I need now is a script to perform the actual backups and save in the appropriate location. Initially I’ll do this using bash script but it is my intention to look at using Python when I have some time on my hands.