Now a blog about my Android adventure
... better than ctrl-z when I mess things up!
Published on October 6, 2011 By CerebroJD In Mobile Tech

Ahhh Git.  What a powerful and mysterious tool to someone who really hasnt read nearly enough about how to do things with it.  The problem that I'm running into is that there seems to be overlap and 'shortcut' commands that are referenced online, but not really described in the 'documentation' I've been using.  By documentation, I mean google-searches.  So its pretty much my own fault that I'm randomly importing stuff into project branches.

Fortunately for me, since I know absolutely that I'm not in a good position to 'commit' or 'upload', so I never use those commands!  This means that whenever I start getting confused/concerned, I hop back up to ~/android/system/ and run a 'repo sync'.  It grabs all the current data from the CyanogenMod source, and throws out anything I've imported or changed.

Now that I've got things a bit more structured, I want to do two things:  First, get an emulator running, and then get the Eclipse build environment complete. At this point, I'll be able to build/edit applications, so I can tackle my first project, the T9 dialer.  I've seen some good attempts, but I dont like their search functions.  

For me, a T9 dialer should do the following:

  • Search based on 'T9' within the name, not just at the start.  (e.g. I should be able to type the numbers for a last OR first name)
  • Also search for phone numbers matching the numeric string (so I can type 556 and it will bring up 403-556-5555)
  • Display at least two, hopefully three results in a viewing pane. Perhaps introduce an option to hide the dialpad to view all results.
  • Maybe have the search occur in ALL contact fields (Organization/Nickname/Address), or have it user-selectable in Options.

This would be the ideal dialer for me... One that is customizable with regards to what fields it searched, and searched whole contact strings.  I feel the default android dialer (especially on my 4.3" screen) could do with some vertical squishing to create the viewing pane at the top.  My dialer currently is HUGE, and could do with being about half its height, as long as the button widths were maintained.

To-do:

  • Create viewing pane.
  • Squish dialer.
  • Build search function that searches contact array fields.
  • Integrate options pane.
  • Learn EVERYTHING

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