Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The NetBeans TestFairy plugin I mentioned a few days ago has received its first enhancement request from Yair Bar-On, the CEO and Co-Founder of TestFairy, on behalf of the TestFairy team ("test fairies"?), and here it is: "I was wondering if there is a way to add one more thing to the plugin. As I understand, the plugin uploads the APK to our service via our API and that is it. Will it be possible that it will also download our instrumented app back to NetBeans IDE, sign it...

Normally, dynamic enablement of Actions in the NetBeans Platform is achieved through observing the state of Objects in the Lookup, as described in How to Make the NetBeans Platform Sensitive to Customers. However, you don't always have a context, e.g, when you have an Action that displays some kind of dialog for logging into something. When the user has been successfully logged in, you want the related Action to be disabled, since there's no point in logging in again. In this...

The NetBeans TestFairy plugin simplifies the process of uploading Android apps to TestFairy.com and getting hold of the URLs for distributing to testers. Here's the URL to the plugin, install it into NetBeans IDE 7.4:http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/52087 Right-click an APK file (either from native Android or PhoneGap/Cordova) and upload it to TestFairy.com. The Options window lets you set the API Key, which you must get from the TestFairy.com site. If no API Key is set,...

Hildeberto Mendonca from Brazil, living in Belgium, spends a few minutes at Devoxx sharing how he created a convincing prototype application in a few hours, using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Once NetBeans IDE has created a Cordova app for you (as I explain how to do here), switch to the Files window, and you'll see this: Notice the yellow Android icon above, which is there because I installed the NetBeans Android plugin. That icon indicates that NetBeans IDE understands that the related folder is somehow special. When you right-click it... you have a native Android application, which you can then develop further as a native Android application: Nice how...

Starting out from yesterday's blog entry, where I controlled the Android camera via an AngularJS Cordova application, let's now, instead of the Android camera, get hold of the Android contacts list. So, do everything explained yesterday, except that you need to include the "Contacts" plugin, instead of the "Camera" plugin, via the tools in NetBeans IDE. Then: <button ng-contacts>Retrieve Contacts!</button><ol ng-repeat="contact in contacts"> <div...

One of my recent holy grails has been to figure out how to get from an AngularJS Seed template to a functioning Cordova app that makes use of the camera on the Android device. And I figured it out, though it took me a day to do so. Not only is this useful for getting the camera to work. The principles you learn along the way should give you the basics for getting you access to all the Android device tools made available via the other Cordova plugins, e.g., "Acceleromatter",...

One of the really nice people I met at DroidCon in Amsterdam over the past few days was Yair Bar-On, CEO and Co-Founder of TestFairy.com. (By the way, the image to the left is not the real TestFairy logo, just a funny one someone on Twitter suggested as a joke but I think is just perfect.) Aside from confounding me with his evil bookmark gimmick (weird puzzly devices on his booth table for no other purpose than to keep you stuck listening to him while you figure out how...

I'm at DroidCon in Amsterdam with Oleg Lola (CEO) and Yuriy Luchaninov (HTML/JS/Android Group Leader) from the RAD.js project at MobiDev, among 1000 or so other people at the conference. RAD.js is yet another cool JavaScript framework: http://rad-js.com Click the Download button above and you'll find, among other things, many helpful samples: What's special about RAD.js? Well, it makes PhoneGap/Cordova applications faster. The problem with PhoneGap/Cordova is that it is...