For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with OpenGL on the Android platform. I wanted to use gluUnProject to translate a 2D-coordinate from the touchscreen to a 3D-coordinate in my ‘world’. This normally is a very straightforward procedure but somehow I couldn’t get it to work. After a very frustrating afternoon I decided that it wasn’t a bug in my code and I started looking for a solution on the web. After a while I came across this thread on the Google Group for Android developers, checkout post number 8. I guess nobody’s perfect, not even the Google engineers working on Android. :)
WordPress: Better Recent Posts
I’ve been struggling with the name of my ‘Last X Posts In Category’ or LXPC widget since I started creating it. Lack of inspiration kept me from changing it to something better. But today it finally came to me, the simple and elegant name I was looking for: Better Recent Posts.
There was only one problem though. The new plugin name suggested that it was an improvement over the existing Recent Posts widget that is included with the default WordPress installation. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. So I had to merge the two together to really live up to the new name and that is exactly what I did. You can see the result in my latest version. Download it here. I also added an option to randomize the posts.
WordPress: LXPC Another Update
Finally got some spare time and fixed one of my todo’s for the LXPC WordPress widget. You can optionally make the widget’s title link to the category that you’ve selected. You can find the latest version on the LXPC Project-page.
Android: Start service at boot
Sometimes your Android application requires the use of a Service. This can be for a variety of reasons. Usually this is because your doing some cpu intensive task and you want to prevent the UI from freezing up on your user. Another possibility might be that you would like to be notified of certain system events, or Intents, as they are called on Android. Usually your service will start and stop in sync with your Activity’s, but sometimes you might want to keep your service running 24/7. When you do, you need to be able to start your service when the user’s phone boots.
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