XML Blues with Android

blueBill Mobile reached more than 200 downloads, with more than 100 active installs. I'm getting a few positive feedbacks and - more important - I didn't receive more problem reports, so I presume that the application is reasonably stable (even though communicating with users is still a problem). Time to move on the next set of features... ... that is multimedia support, for helping the identification on the field. While I have already a catalog of images, taken from Wikipedia, that were part of blueBill Mobile for JavaFX, images present the problem of requiring pre-processing. While they are ok when rendered on a large screen, in may cases the subject get too small on the smartphone and the photo need cropping. I don't see anything else than doing the pre-processing by hand, and it will take some time. For this reason, for Android I decided to start with sounds. I've contacted the guys at Xeno-Canto, a large collaborative database of bird calls, and they told me that the terms of use are compatible with blueBill Mobile. So, there's a prototype working that looks like this:     Dealing with media crosses the border with blueMarine and blueOcean code, but it's not what I'm going to talk about now. The problem I faced was with the managing of the catalogs. xeno-canto only exposes HTML pages, thus I needed to do some HTML scraping to extract the data. There's always some new ma...

Date: June, 23 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/06/24/xml-blues-android

Others News