Google Android is pretty super easy

I've been messing around with my new toy: a HTC Magic cellphone running Google Android. I was lucky enough to get one for free from Google IO last month and have just finally gotten around to actually writing a little app for it. I haven't done anything terribly difficult yet, but from what I have already accomplished in an hour, I can say it has been a breeze.

One thing that wasn't quite as trivial as I was hoping was making an alert dialog box to do some simple runtime debugging. Understanding how it works now makes this much easier, but here is my one-liner:

(new AlertDialog.Builder(this)).setTitle("An Alert")
.setMessage("Some message")
.create().show();

the "this" in my case is my current Activity which is the default class you make when you start a project which extends the necessary Context class (not directly though). This was inside an event handler (which was implemented as an anonymous inner class) so I had to make a named reference to "this" inside the Activity scope so it was the Activities scoped "this" instead of the anonymous inner class's.

Here is the whole relevant code:

package com.gleenn.android;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.app.AlertDialog;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.View.OnClickListener;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.EditText;

public class GlennsFirstApp extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
        Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.Button01);
        final GlennsFirstApp gfa = this;
        button.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
            public void onClick(View v) {
                String twitterUsername = ((EditText)findViewById(R.id.EditText_twitter_username)).getText().toString();
                String twitterPassword = ((EditText)findViewById(R.id.EditText_twitter_password)).getText().toString();
                String statusMessage = ((EditText)findViewById(R.id.EditText_status_message)).getText().toString();
                (new AlertDialog.Builder(gfa)).setTitle("Test")
                    .setMessage(twitterUsername + " " + twitterPassword + " " + statusMessage)
                    .create().show();
            }
        });
    }
}

Ruby 3D Array implementation

# beautiful implementation of a ruby 3D array
# although I am a little irritated you can't just do it the java way and slap
# an extra pair of braces on the end and get a whole extra dimension

class Array3

    def initialize
        @store = [[[]]]
    end

    def [](a,b,c)
        if @store[a]==nil ||
            @store[a][b]==nil ||
            @store[a][b][c]==nil
            return nil
        else
            return @store[a][b][c]
        end
end


    def []=(a,b,c,x)
        @store[a] = [[]] if @store[a]==nil
        @store[a][b] = [] if @store[a][b]==nil
        @store[a][b][c] = x
    end
end

x = Array3.new

x[0,0,0] = 5
x[0,0,1] = 6
x[1,2,3] = 99

puts x[1,2,3]

# from http://www.samspublishing.com/