Cyril Mottier

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” – John Wooden

Blogging and Sharing - Diversifying

Recently, I have been asked several times why I wasn’t blogging anymore. The answer to this query is quite simple: I have been both busy and lazy^^. Busy mainly because of the enormous amount of time I have spent working on, polishing and tweaking the Capitaine Train Android application. Lazy because … hmmmm well, I’m sure you’ll agree with me, it’s relaxing to be lazy from time to time!

Me not posting on my personal blog doesn’t mean I’m not active anymore. Even though I’m not publishing new articles here, I usually keep on sharing some of my thoughts on UI, UX, mobile development – or more generally on all of the topics I love discussing about – on some other web media. In this article, I would like to discuss about these web media I appreciate and use regularly.

The main reason behind me using Twitter or Google+ rather than this blog is time. Indeed, blogging usually requires a lot of time if you want your article to be as perfect as you want it to be. I can assure you, I have spent way more time on writing, correcting and publishing some articles than I would have by publishing them on Twitter and/or Google+. To be honest, I also consider the resulting posts/tweets are way less professional or polished than they would have been on this blog.

Twitter

Twitter is clearly the social network I love the most. First, it’s extremely simple to use. Secondly, it forces people to sum up their ideas because of the 140 characters limit. Finally, it lets people interact with other fellow Twitter users very easily. I regularly tweet and, if you do too, you may be interested in following me at @cyrilmottier. Here is an abstract of some “popular” tweets I published in the past few months:

  • Apr 14, 2014: Stop using Charset.forName(String) and have a look at StandardCharsets (API 19) for common charsets #AndroidDev
  • Apr 7, 2014: Let’s be honest, Apple’s doc is the best when it comes to explain font metrics: . Thx Apple
  • Mar 28, 2014: Here we are! Pull to refresh is now more than official at Google. It’s in the support library:
  • Feb 27, 2014: The “Getting around with Google Maps Android API v2” I made @Devoxx back in November is now available for free!
  • Feb 14, 2014: Storing Parcelable on disk sounds interesting? Never ever do that! Parcel implementation may change and break (un)marshalling #AndroidDev
  • Jan 24, 2014: Starting with KitKat (finally!) you can use isLaidOut() to determine whether a View has been laid out ) #AndroidDev.
  • 20 Jan, 2014: Starting KitKat (Android 4.4) you can ListView#add[Header|Footer]View whenever you want! Calls order are not important anymore. #AndroidDev
  • 8 Jan, 2014: You can enable the “StopShip” lint rule so that your projects containing the // STOPSHIP comment are warned. #AndroidDev

Google+

Google’s social network is also a web media I enjoy. It has one major (dis)advantage (the ‘dis’ addition depends on the point of view) over Twitter: it has no characters limit. I usually use Google+ rather than Twitter when I want to talk about a topic that cannot fit in a 140-characters tweet. Unfortunately, Google+ is clearly not dedicated to technical posts. The best evidence of that is how terrible the code renders in Google+. As a consequence, I consider Google+ as an intermediate media between Twitter and my personal blog: it is nice to discuss about some thoughts very quickly but it is not polished enough to fulfill my requirements about the content I publish.

If you are on Google+ or are willing to create an account, you may find some UI/UX thoughts I shared on my +CyrilMottier account. For instance, I recently started a series of posts entitled “Android app polishing”. These posts gives some insights on how we polished some parts of the Capitaine Train Android application:

Below is a list of some other older Google+ posts that may also interest Android developers:

  • Feb 14, 2014: Smoothly animating TextView’s text color
  • Jan 3, 2014: Using the new Gradle-based Android build system: a new example
  • Dec 30, 2013: Lightweight key-value pairs for Android bundled resources

I think I’ve given enough links in this post to demonstrate you can also follow me on some other web media than my personal blog. I know it’s not easy to keep up on things when they are not aggregated in a single place. However, I’m convinced most of my tweets nor my G+ posts would have no real meaning in this blog. Moreover, Twitter and Google+ are all about sharing present content. They inevitably waste the past by not providing an easy-to-browse history. Because of that I have, I do and I will always prefer the blog medium. Believe me, chances are I will continue posting new articles here!