I have had several people ask me or complain to me about battery drain on their Android device. The beauty of Android (power and customization) also means that sometimes you can make things worse for yourself and never realize it. What I am going to do it attempt to outline many of the things one can do to save battery life.Battery UsageFirst, it would be helpful to know the built in tools Android has. You can check your battery level and usage by going to Menu > Battery. Here it will show you the batteries usage since the last full... [Read More]

Creating the ServiceI recently was tasked with writing a Windows Service. I had never done this before but it seemed to me that it couldn't be that difficult. So I did what any good software engineer would do. I fired up Visual Studio 2012, opened my sample solution I use to test code in, and added a new project selecting the Windows Service template. After this new project is created you start out with several files and I quickly realized I should probably read a tutorial on what to do. A quick google search lead me to an MSDN article.... [Read More]

If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I have been working on an Android app called Drawsaur using PhoneGap. I wanted to implement a way for users to share their drawings with other in the same way you share other content on Android. That lead me to a plugin for sharing content. The problem was that it did not quite work for me following the directions out of the box. However, I had previously used a plugin in my application. So I combined that with what was given to me to get it to work. I also had to... [Read More]