Know about Android UI Components before you start Coding!

UI Resources designing and creation

Take a look at this documentation: It will help you get a clear idea about it: 
http://developer.android.com/design/style/devices-displays.html

Libraries to use in your App

ActionBarSherlock - This allows you to easily develop an application with an action bar for every version of Android from 2.x and up

SlidingMenu - An Android library that allows you to easily create applications with slide-in menus.

Help is just a click away 

Yeah so folks, this is all I have for now, and maybe if I have more things coming to my mind about my lessons learnt on Android, we shall meet again. 

Happy Coding! :)

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”

With no regrets.

Until the day my father’s close relative, Navin, a middle-aged man, pondered over his life and started crying in front of me. I knew then, and I know now, that death, whether it takes you away silently or it tests your valiance in the fight you put up… it will most often never allow you to die with a light heart.

Let me tell you something about Navin. He was the most intelligent man I had ever met. I never had the fortuity to know him as much as I now wished I had, but the bits and pieces about him I knew had spoken volumes about the man he was.

As a teenager, he had done all that his heart yearned for. He was also ahead of his friends. He had the brains, the wit, the intelligence and he was humble. His love for books broke all boundaries. He was well read and a great orator. He did what he loved and I would say, he lived his life.

But that afternoon as he sat by me, pardon me, I should first explain to you about his condition. Navin, during his later years, had both his kidneys failing and every three days a week he had to go and get his dialysis done. During the short time I used to see him, I always knew how tired and drained he looked. Sometimes he used to stare into the void for hours. The young energetic man he used to be, was overtaken by a slightly crouched figure now, who desperately wished he could do more in life.

Coming back to the topic again, he started talking to me about how much he wished he was active in arranging his daughter’s wedding. He was worried by the fact that he was sitting around at home while his wife did most of the work on her own. He desperately wished he could move around, he could help in it together. We tried explaining to him about his health and how he was supposed to take rest.

Image taken from: http://www.ynaija.com/poetry-for-the-fear-of-death/

And all of a sudden the tears came rolling down. I knew for a fact that his silence that day, was the time where he had his life flashing in front of him. He said ,

“I have never done anything in my life. I never achieved what I wanted to and I am never going to achieve anything anymore. It’s my daughter’s wedding and I am sitting around here unable to help or join in. I am just not able to do this. I feel like taking my life away”

At that, the first thing that struck me was about his reference about not achieving anything. I have heard countless stories of his teen years and even his later years where he always did what he really wanted. On trying to comfort him I said “You were a great person in your youth. You should never say you have not achieved what you wanted”. To that, he said “All that was in the past. I had so many wishes for my future. I wanted to write a book, and now I can barely type into the computer. I want to walk around and I can barely stand. It’s my daughter’s wedding and I can’t even do anything what I wanted to do. There are so many things I wanted to do and now I am unable to do any of it”.

His tears spoke a lot of words. It was mainly sorrow mixed with desperation and frustration. His tears meant that, I figured out from the unspoken words, that somewhere at some point in his life, he had been careless, and not done exactly what he ought to have done. Now he wished he could do it. He desperately needed to do something.

Today he is no more. It’s been quite a while without him now. Life has moved on but I will never forget that afternoon. It made me realize how important life is. I am just 20 now, but that afternoon has instilled upon me what it is that most of us fear the most.

Reading this article I do not want you to assume that I fear death. No I don’t. I am only scared of what I think I will not be able to achieve before I die. You may say I am 20, a very young age, to talk about death. But… you never know when it will call for you. All I can now say is that, I am trying hard to change myself, to amend my rather careless way of living of the past. Unlike before, I am now trying hard to keep my relationships with those I am close with because I don’t want to regret it seconds before I leave the face of this earth.

Many fear death will part them from their loved ones. But more than that, I fear I will leave words unspoken and deeds undone.

We may never have the time at a later time. If you wanted to do something, I think now is the time. It hardly happens but that is why I am desperately trying to change. Love and compassion is what you need to hold on to and stubbornness and vanity and carelessness is what you need to give up on. I really need to change myself gradually. And the best part is, I know I will. If I were to die tomorrow I want to die happily.

I pray for Navin’s soul. I know it has attained nirvana. It brought profound sadness to learn about his demise. I have always looked upto him and I will still continue to do so, because apart from the role model he has been to me, he also taught me one of the most fundamental things in life…

Death.

Private keys are very important and should be always kept safe, because if they are missing, you will have a to face alot of difficulties. Your certificates will not work, you will see alot of error messages in Xcode, "No valid signing identity found" , blah blah blah! You will have to go throught the whole process again! 

So with my understanding on how this works, I am going to pen down a walkthrough to guide users on how to do this process. 

For the purposes of this tutorial, I am not going to go into the part where you sign up for the iOS Developer Program. I am going to assume that you have already done this.

Okay so lets get started.

You have created an iPad app and have been running this on the simulator for quite long that you decide you want to run it on real iPad devices. One main piece of knowledge I got while working on an iOS project was the fact that you can never rely completely on a simulator. Its fast and it does your work properly. But it is not the simulator that you will be using if you are reach a wider user base. You need to test it on real devices because, by nature, they are slow and some functionalities don't really run well on simulators (inApp Purchasing).

What is Code Signing?

A code signing entity is the name given to the set of credentials that Apple issues for you. It’s a private-public key. This is stored locally(on your Mac), and when at other times you wish to do your development on other Macs, you would have to re-use this code signing identity on them as well.

Its all about trust! Apple knows your the rightful owner by the certificate you possess. They and the world will know you as the developer that built the app. And that nobody else falsely tried to develop or distribute without your knowledge. 

Lets look at how to create a certificate now.

*For all parts of this tutorial I assume you have signed into your developer account and is in the "Developer Program Resources" screen as shown below.

1. Click on “Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles”.

2. Click on “iOS Apps” because we want to create our certificate for iOS apps.

3. Click on “Certificates”

4. Under the Certificates tab you can see the categories for which you can create your certificates. In our case, we want a certificate to be able for our apps to run on devices during development. Hence click on “Development”

5. You can create the certificate from here by clicking on the little “+” sign.

6. Select the “iOS App Development” option

7. When you click next it now asks you to create a CSR File. For this purpose, do the following:



8. Now that you have created the .certSigningRequest file, upload this file as asked.

9. Click Generate and download the certificate.

10. Double click it and it will automatically be added to your keychain.

11. In your key chain click on “Certificates” and you will see the new certificate.

You now have your certificate on your machine for you to work with.

The next question will be, if you want to be able to use this certificate on another Mac machine, what would you do? Would you have to go through all these steps? Click here to learn how to do this.

Lets Set up the App Id

Whatever the application that we wish to run on the development devices, we need to also create an App id for them. Lets look how. I am assuming you have already created your application on Xcode. 

1. Go to Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles > Identifiers >All

2. Click on the “+” button to add an identifier to your app

3. Give a description to your app. (eg: Name followed by device type etc)

4. Leave the app id prefix as it is if something is already there. Or click on “Generate new”. This will be the first few letters of your Identifier

a. To find your Bundle Id go to XCode > Your Project

b. Click on the Application and then Click on the target

c. Find your Bundle Identifier. Generally, your Bundle id should be in the format <com>.<company name>.<app name> .

Note: Sometimes you might find a wierd set of characters in the suffix of the bundle id. I changed it to be like the one you can see down.

Note: If you haven’t already created your app, then just remember the App id and add this into the info.plist file. The bundle id and the app id should match.

6. In the App services, tick whatever your app makes use of.

7. Confirm your app id and then click on Submit

What about my devices?

What is a provisioning Profile?

It is something that allows your application to run on your devices. It is a collection of your iOS development certificate, UDID and your App Id. Without one, you cannot install your apps on your development devices.

Let us look at how to create a provisioning profile.

1. Go to Certificates, Identifiers and Profiles > Provisioning Profiles > All

2. Click on the “+” button to add one profile.

3. Select the “iOS App Development” option.

4. Select the app id you previously created.

5. Select your certificate that you just created

6. Select the device you set up. (You can create this provisioning profile to work on any number of devices that you register )

7. Give a name for your profile and generate the provisioning profile.

8. You can now download this profile and install it by clicking on it.

9. You can notice that this has been added to your Xcode

As the final step, do this too:
Under Build settings in XCode, set the code signing identity you just created. 


This should be done to both Targets and Projects.


Okay, so we have also created our provisioning profile and ta-da thats it. The app should work fine on your device now (Don't forget to select the device option to run it on the device while running it through Xcode).