Debugging… Yay?

Hello. I hope you’ve had a great week. This past week has been filled with programming, debugging, learning, debugging, watching Psych and WWE, and more debugging. I’ve learned about Android Services, Broadcasts and Receivers, and Notifications. I’ve had the torturous pleasure of putting that knowledge to the test by creating apps that implemented various services, sent and received broadcasts, and generated notifications. I spent plenty of late nights trying to figure out why bits of code weren’t working. Sometimes, the solution was horribly simple and sometimes it was a bit complicated. As you can see, my classes are getting more challenging and I love the challenge, especially in these times of staying in.

Some of the things I’ve learned this week are:

• There are standard and expanded notifications
• Notifications use pending intents
• If you register a broadcast in the manifest the broadcast will be constantly listening for the specified action regardless of the state of the app
• Toasts and Broadcasts sent from an intent service must be sent through a handler running on the main (This error doesn’t have a clear return statement and doesn’t crash your app so it can cause lots of frustration)

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you haven’t seen Psych, it’s currently rerunning on USA and it is one of my favorite tv shows so check it out.

Sincerely,

Mulan Lau