Category Archives: Uncategorized

Will Nexus 5 work in India ?

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This post will answer some of the frequently answered questions if you are planning to import your nexus 5 from USA or UK.

Should I order from US/UK or should I wait?
This is the most frequently asked question by people who want to get their hands on this android beast as soon as possible. My personal advice is to order from US, if you don’t mind taking the risk of using the device without warranty, but badly want the device soon. Given LG’s supply issues, its unlikely that the device starts shipping in India any sooner than 1 st week of December. Although play store for india shows a coming soon message, there has been no official news from Google or lg. Additionally, they have not been able to satisfy the demand in US itself which supports my prediction. From the price point, you won’t gain much by ordering from US. Let me explain why: the phone costs 349 USD. And with tax and local shipping it comes to 385 USD which is 24,000 inr. FedEx will charge 40 USD for shipping which brings the total to 26,000 inr. With customs duty, the total will come to approx 28000 in which not too far from the official price of 28999.
In short, import it if you want hands on experience sooner than your friends. But wait for india launch if you want warranty.

When you are buying a phone from Google play store, make sure you are buying an unlocked one. Unlike India, USA and UK stores sell locked phones which only operate on specific networks.

Nexus 5 will be sold as D820 in USA and D821 in India. But you don’t have to worry about compatibility with your service provider since both these models work in the GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz range which is used by every operator like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Bsnl.

What about the charger/adapter ?
Nowadays, every adapter is designed for travel. Hence they operate on 110 – 220 volts range. The only issue is the wall socket which varies from country to country. US sockets are very thin whereas UK sockets are broad. Neither of them will work with traditional Indian wall plug. You need a small converter which can connect the terminals of the socket to your wall plug. Not a big deal if you are already using a spike busters which are designed to accommodate these sockets.

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App incompatible in Galaxy Tab 10.1/ large screen tablets after recent update

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Faced this problem after a recent update to our app.

Fixed it by releasing new apk with this change in the manifest file.

<supports-screens android:resizeable="true"
              android:smallScreens="true"
              android:normalScreens="true"
              android:largeScreens="true"
              android:xlargeScreens="true" />

More info can be found in android documentation.

Our app was with minSdk = 8 and target sdk = 17 and we didnt face any issues until recently.

Seems like play store changed something at their end.

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Strange effect of setting a website’s geographic target on Adsense

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The other day, I opened Google webmaster tools and started playing around with the settings there. I came across this setting called geographic target and it was hidden deep beneath the enormous amount of configs anddata shown on the page.

Google webmaster tools geographic target

Out of curiosity, I changed the target and set it to India. I didnt have to think much about the consequences of the change since my website was already targeting Indian users and over 90% of daily users were from India. Continue reading “Strange effect of setting a website’s geographic target on Adsense” »

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5 apps every android developer should know about

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Here’s a list of 5 cool apps which will help every developer in developing better apps for android.

Lets dive in to the list.

Android UI PatternsAndroid UI  Patterns

Update : 21/5/13 : App was removed from play store. Download the v4.1 apk file below

Android UI patterns app backup (com.groidify.uipatterns)
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Android UI patterns app backup (com.groidify.uipatterns)
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UI design is the most time consuming and difficult phase of android application development. Deciding on a UI widget to use becomes very challenging until you look at the actual demo. This is where Android UI Patterns app excels at. It lists down all popular UI libraries used in Android and provides with a customizable working demo. It also provides a direct link to the github repository where the source code is hosted at. Some of the most  common libraries you will end up using in every modern app viz.  Action Bar Sherlock, View Pager, Holo Everywhere, Pull to refresh etc are pre-bundled along with the app. If you are new to Android world, this is an excellent app to discover UI patterns used across the platform. More useful if you are a android visual designer wanting to show an android developer the kind of user interaction you would like to see in the app. Every interaction designer will love the app for the demos and every developer will love  the app for providing open source libraries with cool demos.

AIDE - Android IDE

AIDE

Android app on Google Play

Now that you have decided on the UI using the Android UI Patterns app, its time to write code. Typically you will grab a Mac, PC or a linux machine and install ADT to get started. But the coolest thing about android is that you can write, compile, test,  check in and publish your app right from within android.  Meet AIDE, a complete IDE which has syntax highlighting, auto completion, Continue reading “5 apps every android developer should know about” »

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My Google Adsense story

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Few months ago, I had applied for a new google adsense account. This blog post is my experience of getting it approved.

After applying, I was greeted with this email :

Welcome to AdSense!

Your application has been reviewed. Now you need to create your first ad
unit and implement the ad code on your site for the full activation of
your account. Only blank ads will appear at first until the final approval
goes through. Once your site is fully activated, you’ll receive a
confirmation email and begin to see live ads.

Please sign in to Google AdSense to create your first ad unit and get
fully approved by using this guided tour: http://goo.gl/sZIGZ *

* Unfortunately, if you’re using Internet Explorer the guided tour may not
work properly. If you experience problems, please copy this URL
http://goo.gl/sZIGZ and paste it into a different browser’s address bar.

For further information please visit the AdSense Academy:
http://goo.gl/4Pcko

Please keep in mind…

1. Please don’t click on your ads, even to test them — doing so isn’t
permitted by the AdSense program policies:
http://www.google.com/adsense/policies

2. You can add the AdSense code to a new page or site that complies with
our program policies at any time. There’s no need to inform us or apply
for a new account when you do. Please make sure our crawler can access any
webpage you place ad code on: http://goo.gl/NyUEy

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

 

I quickly placed my first ad on my website, and waiting eagerly for the account to be fully approved. After about 3 days, I get a mail which read like this : Continue reading “My Google Adsense story” »

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