So while hate mail can be an occasional but not unusual occurrence, death threats are something new entirely. I understand if you are not a fan of my work, and honestly I really do not care, but to go so far as to threaten my safety is a bit concerning. I truly hope that $1.29 will not break anyone’s bank, not to mention if you are unsatisfied I will gladly provide a refund: no questions asked, no expiration. This is why I am appalled to find personal threats in my email, but I suppose some people just have too much time on their hands and choose to waste it in meaningless ways.

Of course there are also the positive aspects of being a developer which include countless job opportunities. Even though I am not looking for further employment it often find me, and it is a great feeling to know that I have the mobility to choose my field, location, and quantity of work. This is an especially satisfying notion in the current economy.

I suppose that I never would have expected this when I decided to begin development, I saw it as a way to make money on the side and create products that people find appealing. From day one I could not escape the negativity that can often surround this form of work, everything from dissatisfied users who, thanks to their $1.29 purchase, feel entitled to treatment that constitutes hours of labor. I have had users threaten me with negative ratings if I do not supply additional features as well as users that are overwhelming fulfilled that they take the time to send a personal statement to that effect. I guess after so many months I have just learned to wade my way through these waters: I have learned who to ignore and who to thank, which emails to “mark as spam” and which to read, but the one thing I have yet to understand from the hate mail, personal attacks, and death threats is “why you mad bro?”

At the bottom of the application is a permanent graphical link to supporting organizations including The UltraLinx and UltraUI. For those who wish to support development or remove these graphics there is a donation option. We hope that those who can will consider donating when possible.

For more info head over to The Seven+ Project’s blog post or just give ChargeBar a shot by downloading it on the Android Market.

Let me make myself abundantly clear: WebAssign is the worst piece of software that I have ever had to deal with to date! The reasons for this are rather simple: from a software engineers perspective the user experience is awful, very circa 1999. There is little to no use of Javascript for form validation, asynchronous loading, or animations. Of course there are dozens of websites like this that I use for school including Edline and Moodle, so that can be easily overlooked assuming the software has a perceived benefit to both teachers and students alike. However, that is simply not the case!

Few can complain about Moodle because it is FOSS, if a school system is not fond of it they do not have to use but, but if they do it will not cost them a thing. Edline, while neither free nor open source, comes at no cost to the student and does not require participation on the student’s behalf. Then there is WebAssign, a website for completing homework assignments online that requires student participation, increases daily screen time (which is hardly needed nowadays), and comes at a mandatory per-course cost to students! In short, students now have to pay to do homework!

What if a student does not have a computer or access to the internet at home (this is increasingly becoming an assumption and can have absolutely dreadful consequences but that is another story)? The Cambridge Public Library system allows any member to have one hour of daily access to a computer with the internet (and this is pretty good considering most municipal systems cannot promise such access). In all fairness the one hour is plenty of time to get work done, and honestly about as much time as any human being should be required to sit in front of an inanimate, light-emitting machine. However, should the student not be able to complete their assignment within this time what are they to do?

Finally, there is one other more major concern with WebAssign: it decreases the time in which a student can complete an assignment and increases their ability to cheat. WebAssign depersonalizes homework, preventing a teacher from becoming familiar with a student’s handwriting, style, etc. It also does not provide a means of showing one’s steps, so the quality of feedback decreases. Without showing one’s work cheating becomes phenomenally easier as well. Finally, most teachers seem to use 11:59pm as a deadline to prevent ambiguity, but from the perspective of a student who completes homework in the morning this forces them to churn out work quicker, focusing on completion and less on correctness.

While WebAssign warrants my concern, this is about as much time as I am willing to allot to this post. I must make this brief because I have until 11:59pm tonight to turn in my homework electronically. If you are an educator reading this allow me to summarize: DO NOT USE WebAssign! If you are a student reading this: TELL YOUR TEACHER NOT TO USE WebAssign! The perceived benefits of easier plagiarism will only determent your education, plus does it really make sense to pay to do your homework?

The best part of all, it is open source! For those interested in learning how this application does what it does simply head over to the StatusBar+ repository in GitHub and grab yourself a copy of the source code. For more information check out the Seven+ Project’s blog post. As always, happy developing.

Today is the start of the Seven+ UI for Android. Nothing but aesthetically pleasing, efficient applications. As always your feedback is invaluable; all suggestions, bug reports, and questions are welcome. Check out the new site, the new Twitter… the new everything!

Announcing the initial public release of my Seven+ Calculator for Android It is freely available on the Android Market and works for version 1.6 (Donut) or greater.

Inspired by the beauty and simplicity of the Metro User Interface, Seven+ Calculator offers an easy to use, effective alternative to the default Android calculator application. This calculator includes all basic operations (multiplication, division, subtraction, and addition) as well as advanced operations (sine, cosine, tangent, logarithms, exponentials) and more.

In the portrait orientation basic operations are displayed; in the landscape orientation advanced operations are displayed. The memory function saves a number and the preferred trigonometric mode (degree, radian, or gradian) even after the device is rebooted.

Press the menu button to be given the option to choose the preferred accent color, which will display using the fly out animation.

The solution is to check with the keyboard meta state, and it is fairly simple! If you know what key you want to the code below should help you handling keyboard meta states:

final char[] mZeroChar = { '0' };
if (event.getMatch(mZeroChar, event.getMetaState()) == mZeroChar[0])
{
    // The key that is zero in some meta state was pressed.
}

That’s it, and that can be applied to any key you need. Hope that helps, and as always happy coding.