Posts Tagged ‘android’

Logging steps via Google Docs

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

My employer, Pearson, provided the opportunity for its employees to participate in the 2011 Global Corporate Challenge. The GCC consisted of teams of 7 who tracked their daily steps counted with a pedometer for 16 weeks. The idea is to motivate people to become more active. The event started on May 19, 2011 and ended September 6, 2011. Being an engineering type of person, I liked the idea of gathering the daily step count as a metric for activity. The event suggested a goal of achieving 10,000 steps a day. I was pretty active recording my pedometer activity every morning via the SMS text message data entry technique: the GCC has an SMS short code and you entered the date and number of steps. Submitted text messages were recorded in your step log on the GCC web site. Being able to enter the data via my phone was very handy as it let me enter data while I was on vacation without missing a day. But, now that the event is over, I still wanted to keep track of my step counts. Here is the technique that I worked out using Google Docs to record my step counts.

I created a Google Docs Form to collect my daily step count. The collected data is stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. The form can be viewed in a web browser or in Google Docs for Android. Since I have an Android phone, the form lets me use my phone to still collect my daily step counts each morning. And since the data is stored in a spreadsheet, I can perform calculations on the data to get my total and average step counts and even graph my daily totals. Here is the process that I use.

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First post using WordPress for Android

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

This post was created on Droid phone using WordPress for Android. You can find more details about the app at http://android.wordpress.org/.

Hello, Android

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

So, July 11, 2008, came and went. What happened on July 11? The iPhone 3G came out.

But I don’t have an iPhone. The other big thing is that the Apple iPhone App Store opened. But I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t run the emulator or create my own apps for the emulator.

So, I celebrated by creating my first Android app.

Hello, Android

This is the “Hello, World” version of an Android app running in the emulator. It was very easy to make. What made it easier for me is that Android apps are written in Java. (I am a Java developer by day.) The “Getting Started” tutorial even shows you how to use Eclipse.

I have only created the sample app so far, but it looks pretty easy for a Java developer to write an “Activity“. But, of coarse, the apps currently can only run in the emulator. But the emulator can be integrated very easily into Eclipse.

Though, it is not like having real hardware like the Apple iPhone. 🙂