Logging in Android

From the Code Partners blog:

RAD Studio’s ability to do remote debugging of Android apps on device is fantastic for tracking down issues. However sometimes you have issues where the debugger can’t help. Case in point is one of the projects we were doing for a customer recently. The Android portion included a Service, which needed to be auto-started when the Android device booted. It worked fine if it was started manually, but auto-starting at boot resulted in a crash. We couldn’t use the RAD Studio debugger as it was all over so quickly at boot time. Fortunately we were already logging messages out to the Android logs from within our app, so we were able to track down the problem. How?

Expired Apple Intermediate Certificates and RAD Studio iOS Development

From the Code Partners blog :

Last week we were doing some updates for a customer on a C++Builder Android and iOS app. The Mac that we were using to do the code signing for iOS hadn’t been used for this before, so we needed to setup the Certificates and Provisioning Profiles for the customer’s account.

I always dread this part, as I’ve found it always takes longer and is more complicated than you expect. I’ve done it enough times now though that I thought I’d struck all the issues, however this time I found a new one that I thought I should document for anyone else (or my future self) who strikes it.

MVVM and MenialTasks : Why did I use TEnumerableBindSourceAdapter instead of TListBindSourceAdapter?

In the comments over on my old MVVM Resource List post Peter Rosario asked a great question. A question I thought I’d covered in my video but I suspect I might have edited it out in an attempt to fit into the CodeRage time limits. So I thought I’d answer it here.

The question was about my MenialTasks sample app, and why I’d used TEnumerableBindSourceAdapter to bind my collection of TTasks to the UI, rather than the more common TListBindSourceAdapter.

TListBindSourceAdapter has a lot going for it. It comes “in the box”, would certainly have been easier, and would work just fine. Given that, why didn’t I use it? Read On…

App Tethering Series Update

I’ve had a few questions from folks about the App Tethering articles I’ve been posting, specifically, when the next one is coming.

Between work and preparing for a grading I’ve been a bit busy, however I’ve now started writing the next post and have a few more planned. The next one should be up in a week or so.

Also, several people have asked if they can get them all combined into a single document. Once I have the remaining articles done I’ll combine them and post the details.

App Tethering : Remote Actions

After the last few posts, you should be getting comfortable sharing data between multiple apps. That leaves us the last of our original four conceptual areas to cover off : Actions.

Just as App Tethering allows you to share pieces of data out to remote applications, it also allows you to share TActions (strictly speaking, any TCustomAction descendant, but I’ll use TAction for short). Right now you’ve possibly got at least one button or menu item connected to a TAction somewhere in your app. More likely you have dozens of them. Shared Actions let you expose these TActions unchanged, so they can be triggered from remote apps as well. Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Transient Resources

Now that we know how to work with Persistent Resources, Transient Resources are going to be a walk in the park.

Transient Resources have many things in common with Persistent Resources. They come in both Data and Stream types. They are one-way. Also their network behaviour is much the same as Persistent Resources. ie. Transient Data Resources are sent via UDP Point-to-Point whereas Transient Stream Resources are notified via UDP Point-to-Point but the value is actually transmitted via TCP.

Where they differ is mostly around the details of how they are sent, and how much work you have to do vs how much the framework does for you. Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Persistent Resources Part 2

Last post we were introduced to sharing resources, in particular, persistent resources, and we wrote an example to share a persistent resource of type Data between two apps.

This time around let’s do the same with a resource of type Stream. On the surface it feels pretty similar, but we’ll look under the covers to understand a key difference between sharing Data and Stream resources, and why you might opt to use a Stream resource even if you are sharing a String.

Read On…

App Tethering : Sharing Persistent Resources Part 1

In the last post, we went through one method of discovery, AutoConnect, and then built a couple of apps that used AutoConnect to find, authenticate and pair with each other.

That’s fine, but there’s not a lot of point in having two apps connected to each other unless they can interact. In App Tethering, that interaction comes in two forms: sharing resources and sharing actions. In this article we’re going to start looking at sharing resources. Read On…

App Tethering : Discovery and Pairing

In the previous post, we covered an overview of what App Tethering is and how some customers have used it. We also covered the four conceptual areas of App Tethering:

Discovery – finding other apps, including whether you are looking for other apps over BlueTooth or IP Network
Pairing – connecting to other apps, once you’ve found them. This includes Authentication.
Resources – sharing data with connected apps
Actions – sharing Actions with connected apps

Let’s take each of these concepts and start looking in more detail. Read On…

App Tethering : Overview

One of the capabilities introduced in recent versions of RAD Studio and AppMethod is App Tethering. Over a number of posts I want to explore App Tethering further, starting from an overview of the technology and then going further down… down eventually to the network packet level. My aim is you’ll come out with a quite thorough understanding not just how to use App Tethering, but also what you might use it for.

In the absence of anywhere else to start, let’s start with a question.

What is App Tethering?

In its simplest terms, App Tethering makes it easy for apps to find and communicate with each other. Now, I accept that is so generic an explanation as to be almost useless. You could say something similar about DataSnap, or EMS, or plenty of other distributed systems. So let’s shed a bit more light.