Something I was working on before Christmas: a web app for recording what you spend your time working on, using a painting metaphor – with your projects as a palette of different paint colours.
The video is quite high resolution, so it’s best viewed in full-screen in the highest resolution supported.
Overview
How to receive push notifications using MQTT in an Android mobile application
Background
I’ve written before about MQTT as a technology for doing push notifications to mobile. When I wrote that, I gave an example Android project. However, it was the first time I’d ever done Android development, and while it was an okay Java MQTT sample, it was a poor Android sample – I didn’t know anything about how Android works as a platform.
I’ve since written other Android MQTT apps, such as a hackday app for pushing updates from websites to your phone and learnt a lot about how to do it properly. Well… if not properly, at least a little better.
But Google is still directing people to my old, and probably unhelpful, sample. So it’s about time that I share something more useful.
I’ve put the full source for a sample implementation below. (Note that I’m using the Java J2EE client library from ibm.com). Hopefully the comments in it are clear enough, but here are a few of the key points.