Rubik's Cube Algorithms v2.0

After almost 100h of spare time coding I'm finished with the rewrite of Rubik's Cube Algorithms v2.0. I've basically rewritten every single line of code in the whole application. But if you ask me the result is great! And hopefully the users will appreciate it as well. The app can be found at Android Market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=se.slackers.cube

Features:

• F2L/PLL/OLL algorithms
• Algorithms rotation
• Trigger moves grouping
• Add / Edit custom algorithms

Planned features:

• Ad-free version
• 4x4 and 5x5 renderers
• Better trigger detection for the left hand
• Nicer layout for tablets

Multi Threaded Fractal Renderer in Swing

After seeing Jeff Pershing's post on a obfuscated madelbrot renderer in python I naturally had to try the python snippet provided. Sitting on a quad-core 3GHz machine I felt a bit disappointed when it took a long time to render the fractal and only one core was used. Performance was not a part of their initial goals so I will forgive them but I felt obliged to make a multi threaded version. For science!
Said and done, it was surprisingly smooth coding and the end result is pretty decent. The palette was by far the most time consuming thing to implement, it's hard to find good colors. Only basic controls for navigating the fractal are implemented, mouse wheel to zoom and click to center.

Screenshot from the application

The code can be found at my repository on bitbucket. 

BIRT Documentation

Recently I've had the pleasure opportunity to work with BIRT for a reporting project. My conclusion is that it is by far, the most inaccessible open source project I've ever seen. This post is dedicated to my future self. 

Hey! Here are the links you've been looking for!

• BIRT Javadoc (hidden inside http://help.eclipse.org)
• BIRT Source can be found at git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/birt

Good luck, you'll need it...

Cubing for charity #3

It's time for #3 in the series 'Cubing for charity'. Which is the concept that until the profit from ads in Rubik's Cube Algorithms (and other apps) reaches a substantial part of my income, it will be donated to charity.
This time I've chosen to give the $38 USD (250 SEK) to the Red Cross. The reason why I chose them is because of the drought in Africa. And the only way to get help there fast enough is to go through a large organization, ie the Red Cross. 

According to their site, your cubing,tapping and tracking has given around 35 people food for a month. Not much, but it's something. 

Simple Tracker

Yesterday I released my third app which is called Simple Tracker. It's basically a calendar were you can enter data on different variables and then be able to plot the values over time.
Obviously there are far more advanced fitness / health applications out there, but in my opinion they are too advanced. I don't know how many grams of cereals I eat for breakfast or how much cheese are on my pizza. What I do know are which days I workout and the measurements I make. And that is what I use the application for. ie. recording my weight a couple of times each week and annotate the days I workout with a color depending of the activity.
Below are some of the screenshots from market, please note that this is sample data :)

Calendar overview 

Viewing data

The app can be found on Android Market and is currently in beta and free but ad-supported. It will of course be a part of my Cubing For Charity campain. 

Width of an element in javascript

When starting with the gwt-floating-header project i ran into some problems with getting, what i call, the" true width" of an element in javascript. With "true width" i mean the width of the element excluding padding, border and margin. And because i'm writing for GWT I don't have luxury of be able to use the .width() function in jQuery.
It took me a while to get the script to this point and i'm not really sure if it works for all browsers but it might help someone to get started.

function width(element) {
		var style = element.currentStyle	|| element.ownerDocument.defaultView.getComputedStyle(element, null);
		var safe = function(v) { return parseInt(v, 10) || 0; };
		return element.offsetWidth - safe(style.paddingLeft)
				- safe(style.paddingRight) - safe(style.borderLeftWidth)
				- safe(style.borderRightWidth);
}

GWT version of this snippet can be found here. Please let me know if you find any strangeness or incompatibilities in the code.

EDIT: It seems that margin shouldn't be in the calculation.

Floating table headers for GWT

Today I've created a Google code project for the GWT port of my jQuery floating header plugin. It's a very lightweight library that already supports both column and row headers. Since the code base is very young i haven't had the chance to try the compatibility with a lot of browsers but in time i might do this.

The project is available at:
   http://code.google.com/p/gwt-floating-header/.