Project 1: Catcher

This is an android application to transfer files from your phone to somewhere else. I will be built as a PC solution but can be used for a server solution also.

So I was trying to transfer some documents to my android phone and could not find an easy way to do this. In the end I transferred to my onedrive and then opened up one the android Microsoft Onedrive application and downloaded the file to my android device.

There are a lot of ways to get data on to and off your android device. For this first project I am going to build one more. The reason I am building this is I am going to make a lot of use of it in some upcoming projects.

You can find the current version of this project here: catcher

This will be an android application. I have been programming Android for a while now. So I have a few libraries I like to reuse. I will go over them in this blog post

1. compile ‘de.greenrobot:eventbus:2.4.0’
2. compile ‘de.greenrobot:greendao:1.3.7’

These two libraries simplify android development a lot. In every android project I just automatically include them.

EventBus

is a very simple to use event bus for android. I have been programming android for a long time now and honestly I am still not sure what is the best way to communicate between activities, fragments, services, controls etc. Well with EventBus I don’t have to think about this stuff, just use the bus. It works it is really simple has every option you could need and is super fast.

greenDAO is an ORM. This simplifies database development on android. There are a few quirks to using it which I will go over in upcoming posts. Anyway key point this is an android application I don’t want to spend any time thinking about the data layer I want to get on to building the application.

There are a couple of other libraries I am including in this application

jeromq

This whole project is going to be built on this so I will be coming back to this later.

Bolts This is new. I want to use this to handle the threading for this application. Before this I used RXAndroid why the change? I found it a bit awkward and clumsy. Well lets see I could end up eating my words before very long.

Anyway the build.gradle is as follows

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
apply plugin: 'android-apt'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 23
    buildToolsVersion "23.0.2"

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "ie.programmer.catcher"
        minSdkVersion 19
        targetSdkVersion 23
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
        multiDexEnabled true
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    testCompile 'junit:junit:4.12'
    compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.1.0'
    compile 'com.android.support:design:23.1.0'

    compile 'org.zeromq:jeromq:0.3.5'
    compile 'de.greenrobot:eventbus:2.4.0'
    compile 'de.greenrobot:greendao:1.3.7'
    compile 'commons-io:commons-io:2.4'
    compile 'com.path:android-priority-jobqueue:1.1.2'
    compile 'com.parse.bolts:bolts-tasks:1.3.0'
    compile 'com.parse.bolts:bolts-applinks:1.3.0'
    compile 'org.androidannotations:androidannotations-api:3.3.2'
    compile('com.github.afollestad.material-dialogs:core:0.8.5.0@aar') {
        transitive = true
    }
    apt 'org.androidannotations:androidannotations:3.3.2'
}