I gave a presentation about Flutter. It’s a lightweight overview, with a short discussion afterwords.
I learned Flutter for a client who wanted to explore it for a project they had in mind. They wanted someone with knowledge of Android, iOS, and anything else that might come up. Learning Flutter was a lot of fun! I have been on a few mobile projects since then where Flutter might have made a lot of sense. It would be great to get the chance to use it again in the future.
You can view the presentation below. I should note that I had to put it together on short notice. I would have liked to have had a more organized demo, but the presentation still works.
Question: Do you use Mint.com? Question: Do you wish you had more detailed reports? Question: Are you handy with a spreadsheet?
I go through this every year when my tax adviser asks for a list of expenses for the previous year.
Follow these instructions:
Get the data out of Mint
Log into Mint, go to Transactions
Limit by whatever criteria you want, or choose “All Accounts”
Scroll to bottom of page, choose “Export all xxx transactions”
Save csv file to desktop
CSV stands for “Comma Separated Values”
Import the data into your spreadsheet:
Open your spreadsheet program (LibreOffice Calc, MS Excel, Google Sheets)
Choose to import data, which should open a wizard to help you with the import
This is very import – make sure your import wizard formats your dates as actual Dates. If you skip this step it might import your dates as text, and sorting will not work well.
I usually have to export every single transaction from Mint. After I import I delete the rows I don’t want to get the date range I’m looking for.
Recently I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with other people’s code.
I’ve been forking games on Github to learn a little about how they work. I then change them so that they are impossible to lose. They turn out to be very short and completely useless beyond a couple laughs. Messing around with the code is almost more fun than the end result.
This started when a coworker was telling me that he had never won a video game. A few of us started coming up with ideas for games where it was impossible to lose. They seemed pretty funny, so I decided to play around with the idea a little bit.
I’ve only done a couple games so far. I’ve had some challenges along the way:
Most of these projects are stale and need a little work to get them working again. I spent a lot of time importing Eclipse projects into Android studio and working out the details
I had to pull apart a lot of conveniences: game options, number of lives, difficulty settings
I’m impressed how entertaining they are to put them together when I have no regards for playing it safe. Every hack is on the table as a possibility. I only have to worry about one thing – never lose.
“Tetris Can’t Lose”
I named this game after the old tv show “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose”
This was my first attempt at changing a game. It had a couple of surprises:
Tetris isn’t designed to win! You keep playing until you lose. So I had to come up with a way to win the game, and add it as an option in the game play.
I decided to add a funny “TaDa!” sound, so I had to add MediaPlayer and SoundPool. This change has become my exclamation point, and has made it into the other games as well.
I had to clean up some code, create a new launch icon, etc
One thing I regret is that I didn’t fork the repo correctly. I ended up losing some history that I wanted to show in Github. It’s not a big deal, but I wanted to make sure whoever ran into the project knew that I based it off someone else’s work. I ended up adding a note to the project’s readme.
I ran across this breakout game on Github. It had all the parts that I was looking for, and as a bonus it included lots of documentation. It was a sample game that explained a lot about how to write a game for Android.
It was rather stale, so it took a bit to import it into Android Studio and get it to work
It had a lot of game options I had to remove or change for my needs
I had to play around with the settings to get the most humor out of it
This one was different in that you don’t win immediately like in the Tetris game. You can move the paddle around and try to make the process faster, but it doesn’t matter.
Keeping the game play intact was a good idea – it makes the game a little more fun. The ball can’t fit past the paddle, but it looks like it could. It’s amazing to see people’s first reaction when they play. They have an initial sense of urgency to save the ball even though it’s impossible for it to fit past the paddle.