adobe - Dave's Blog

View PDFs on Android

2010 Jan 10, 4:07

Irritatingly, my G1 won't show me PDFs so I've made the Google Docs PDF viewer which will load PDFs on the web up in Google Docs. Google Docs has the useful ability to display PDFs in web browsers without any Adobe software and works (mostly) on Android.

This was very easy to put together as an Android activity. First its necessary to register the application as handling PDFs from the web. This is done via the intent-filter declaration in the manifest:

   intent-filter
      action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/
      data android:scheme="http" android:mimeType="application/pdf"/
      category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/
      category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/
   /intent-filter

The action part says my activity will view PDFs, the data part says it accepts data with the PDF mime-type and with a URL that has an HTTP scheme. The browsable category is necessary to allow links from a browser to open this activity.

Second, the activity opens up the browser to Google Docs pointing to the PDF.

   Intent intent = new Intent();
   intent.setAction(getIntent().getAction());
   intent.setData(Uri.parse(
    "http://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=" + 
    percentEncodeForQuery(getIntent().getData().toString())));

   startActivity(intent);

This is very simple code to invoke a new intent browsing to a newly constructed URL for the PDF in Google Docs. That was easy.google docs technical g1 code activity programming android google pdf

Chumby will be cool, despite its name

2008 Feb 19, 1:51

I signed up for the pre-release beta and purchased a Chumby last year. Chumby looks like a cousin to a GPS unit. Its similar in size with a touch screen, but has WiFi, accelerometers, and is pillow like on the sides that aren't a screen. In practice its like an Internet alarm clock that shows you photos and videos off the Web. Its hackable in that Chumby Industries tells you about the various ways to run your own stuff on the Chumby, modifying the boot sequence (it runs Linux), turning on sshd, etc, etc. The Chumby forum too has lots of info from folks who have found interesting hacks for the device.

When you turn on the Chumby it downloads and runs the latest version of the Chumby software which lets you set alarms, play music, and display Flash widgets. The Chumby website lets anyone upload their own Flash widgets to share with the community. I tried my hand at creating one using Adobe's free Flash creation SDK but I don't know Flash and didn't have the patience to learn.

Currently my Chumby is set to wake me up at 8am on weekdays with music from ShoutCast and then displays traffic and weather. At 10am everyday it switches to showing me a slide-show of LolCats. At 11pm it switches to night mode where it displays the time in dark grey text on a black background at a reduced light level so as not to disturb me while I sleep.

I like the Chumby but I have two complaints. The first is that it forces me to learn flash in order to create anything cool rather than having a built-in Web browser or depending on a more Web friendly technology. The second complaint is about its name. At first I thought the name was stupid in a kind of silly way, but now that I'm used to the name it sounds vaguely dirty.

chumby review flash linux

Theme Options

2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like Scribd for (mostly legal) documents, SciVee for scientific research videos, Wordie for words, and Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an RSS based REST API. The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure the regular readers can guess I use an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with Silver Surfer and Happy Hipo but in general changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.

When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from ColourLovers. They discuss the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but they don't have an easily accessible API.colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design