Blogs

What do you think about a 17 button mouse?

I am sure, if you are one of the many World of Warcraft (WOW) players like me, a gamers’ mouse is not the latest thing. But for amateur gamers, let me discuss this special mouse.

The Razor Naga is the ultimate Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming mouse that shifts the balance between keyboard and mouse by putting an unprecedented number of in-game commands in one place.

The mouse has been optimised with an extra 12 buttons which are customisable to keyboard settings on the computer. This multi-button mouse will place every command you need in the palm of your hand.

According to GamesCom, the mouse enables players to “run rings” around other players who rely on a conventional keyboard to move around, jump, dance, and thwart evil plots.

This would certainly make the games easier to play, give maximum comfort for long gaming sessions and make you a more competitive evil doer plot thwarter.

What is Android?

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android OS can be used as an operating system for cellphones, netbooks and tablets, including the Dell Streak, Samsung Galaxy Tab and other devices.

Skills you’ll need to dive into Android programming:

• For technical and programming skills, knowing Java will make you more comfortable. Also understanding of common, object-oriented languages like C++ and C# will make someone pick things up quickly, as apps you develop in Android are heavily dependent on the said frameworks.

• Some experience with a tag-based view technology like HTML or Adobe's Flex will makes the views very familiar.

Difficulties you’ll encounter:

• Layouts would be the hardest initial things to overcome as an Android developer.  It required digging into the source code to make things look the way you wanted. There were things that were just not skinnable, or required making a completely new component, or changing the design.

• Taking full-size pictures in the app and using those pictures is harder than it should be.

• Another thing that is almost unbelievable is how much of a pain it is to work with maps. It requires signing up for an API key per computer to even see maps. Compare that to iPhone map development with Google maps, where you don't have to do any of that. They just work.

Tools you should have on hand:

• You need the Android software development kit, which comes with the emulator. Most developers prefer Eclipse for Java development, and the Android Developer Tools work with Eclipse.

• It also really helps to have a device, especially when doing things with location or with the camera.

Things you need to consider as you are creating Android-based apps for multiple devices:

• The big one is layout. If you fudge a layout to just get it working on a single device, it's going to get you later. You'll also need to prepare for different APIs not being supported, like the camera for instance. Designing the application well is going to make you think harder about the core functionality and use cases you want to support.

Best support resources for Android programmers:

• The Android Developers site would be a great help. It has all the associated documents, code and the Google groups.

• And as Android is open source, you can easily run searches and see what Google engineers did to make the core apps do what they do.

That’s it for a start on programming in Android. Contact KAYWEB if you need an Android app developed for you or your business/organisation.

Having optimally-running software is quite a bit of challenge. The main difficulty in achieving maximum speed lays in small implementation details, that, if not treated properly on time, build up and often are difficult to track down.

In a nutshell, writing a fast program means coding the same logic in fewer steps required for the computer to perform.

The following are several simple hints for programmers related with the well-known statements.

Program codes seldom follow a unidirectional path if statements are probably the most used statements of all. The syntax of the statement is:

if <condition holds true> then <do something with THEN (TRUE) caluse>
otherwise <do something with ELSE (FALSE) clause>

Firstly, some sign legends:

• == - EQUALS TO
• != - NOT EQUALS TO
• && - AND clause
• || - OR clause
• ! - NOT (NEGATION) clause

Usually, the condition of the if statement is comprised of multiple atomic (unbreakable into simpler pieces) conditions with optional NOT negation clause that are joint together with AND or OR clauses.

Example:
1. (a == b) && (c != d)
2. (a != b) && (c != d)
are both valid if conditions. Let's analyse the number of steps needed to gain a result.

(a == b) && (c != d) - in human language this means that to perform THEN clause a and b must be the same and c and d must be different.
This condition is equivalent to (a == b) && !(c == d). So

1. Check if a is equal to b
2. Check if c is equal to d
3. Negate the result of 2.
4. Output TRUE if 1. and 3. are TRUE

All in all 4 steps.

(a != b) && (c != d) - in human language this means that to perform THEN clause a and b must be different and so must c and d.
This condition is equivalent to !(a == b) && !(c == d). So

1. Check if a is equal to b
2. Negate the result of 1.
3. Check if c is equal to d
4. Negate the result of 3.
5. Output TRUE if 2. and 4. are TRUE

All in all 5 steps.

Disjunctive Normal Forms (DNF) and Conjunctive Normal Forms (CNF) are methods to transform a condition into an equivalent condition (which may result to better performance in computer terms).

DNFs contain atomic conditions that are related to each other with OR clauses.
CNFs contain atomic conditions that are related to each other with AND clauses.

Following are statements that we will use to figure out how to optimise conditions of if statements.

1.
DNFs result to TRUE value if at least one of its conditions is TRUE,
CNFs result to TRUE value if and only if all of its conditions are TRUE.
Likewise,
CNFs result to FALSE value if at least one of its conditions is FALSE,
DNFs result to FALSE value if and only if all of its conditions are FALSE.

2.
DNFs can be converted into CNFs and vice versa using the following rules. I will use <==> sign to mark equivalency.

• A || B <==> !(!A && !B)
• A && B <==> !(!A || !B)

Having the two statements above we can deduct that the (a != b) && (c != d) condition can be performed faster by performing less steps. Really,

• (a != b) && (c != d) <==> !(a == b) && !(c == d) ,
• which by the DNF to CNF interconversion rule <==> !( !(!(a == b)) || !(!(c == d)) ).
• ! applied twice neutralises itself thus we have !( (a == b) || (c == d) ).

Analysing the result we have the following steps

1. Check if a is equal to b
2. Check if c is equal to d
3. Take TRUE if either 1. or 2. or both are TRUE
4. Take the negated result of 3.

So instead of 5 steps we managed to do the same thing in 4 steps. Taking a close look at both versions
!(a == b) && !(c == d) and !( (a == b) || (c == d) )
we can clearly see that the optimum one has less NEGATION clause. So the verdict is:

1. NEGATION clauses can be trimmed
2. Excessive NEGATION clauses can slow down the code.

Modern programming languages are going one extra step to optimise the code further by making good use of the 1. statement about DNFs and CNFs:

• For DNFs if the code encounters a TRUE atomic clause it disregards the rest of the clauses as they will not influence the final result,
• For CNFs if the code encounters a FALSE atomic clause it disregards the rest of the clauses as they will not influence the final result.

So, approaching wisely here, we can in less than the 4 steps achieve the same results as above:

• For DNFs put the likely TRUE clauses before the rest of the clauses,
• For CNFs put the likely FALSE clauses before the rest of the clauses.

Let's consider !( (a == b) || (c == d) ) again.

1. Check if a is equal to b
2. If 1. is TRUE negate 1. and take the result as an answer (2 STEPS ONLY), otherwise If 1. is FALSE Check if c is equal to d
3. Take TRUE if either 1. or 2. or both are TRUE
4. Take the negated result of 3.

Considering that 2. has 50/50 chance to be TRUE or FALSE we finally have that on average the whole statement can be performed in ( 2 + 4 ) / 2 = 3 steps.

So we gained approximately 40% performance improvement in obtaining a result for the condition (a != b) && (c != d).

Additionally, if an
if (condition) then else
can be transformed into an equivalent
if (condition) then
form then the code will avoid an unnecessary calculation which is also an optimisation measure.

Further to come,
1. Does unary operators have underwater reefs.
2. Memory usage versus quick execution, an example.