Jelly Bean LWP Retrospective

My brother and I have been working on a game for the upcoming OUYA console.  We got a little burnt out on a particular design issue and needed a breather, a small fun project to lift our spirits.  So we decided to try our hand at a Live Wallpaper for Android.  1 week later and here we are, you can see the results on the Android market:

ShiVa Native Projects for Android – A Guide for the Forgetful

This article covers the basics of exported Android ShiVa projects.  If you are trying to integrate Java or C libraries, for instance the ScoreLoop API, the following information could come in handy.  I had to stumble through this process with the scattered bits of documentation and I get tired of re-learning it every time I start a new project.  The article assumes basic familiarity with Eclipse, Java, C, Android and JNI.

Most of this content is based on the file that Stonetrip provides, on windows it is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Stonetrip\ShiVa Authoring Tool\Data\Windows\Windows\Build\S3D SDK – Readme.txt

Using Regular Expressions to parse XML

My first Android project was a dashboard status widget for World of Warcraft servers.

WoW Status Widget

I’ve done my share of XML reader coding in .NET and I wasn’t thrilled about using the XMLReader Java class.  In my experience, the methods for parsing an XML structure are not simple or elegant, it always feels like too much code to  arrive at the data you want. I love XML for what it is, it’s great for serializing classes (if those classes are under your control) but I hate working with it from a parsing perspective.  If your experience is different, please enlighten me!