The Loud Texter app has reached a 1,000 downloads today (hooray!) - big thanks to everyone using it and sending feedback.

As a reminder, here is the short description of what it does:

Ever had a sudden urge to express your emotions? Like when stuck in traffic next to a really nice car, or when trying to tell your friend across the room that the show is excellent (or not so much), or when just trying to say hi to a total stranger on a bus?
Now you can! Just enter what you want to convey, and this little app will slowly (or quickly, your choice) scroll your text across your phone's screen in VERY LARGE LETTERS, so your intended message target could read it even from far away.
Functions:
1. enter the text of your desired message
2. choose the color
3. choose how fast to scroll it (slow/med/fast)
4. choose if you want to display it in all caps or not (defaults to all caps)
5. hit go and tell the world all that you think about it!

Tech post alert!

While working on my next application, I have stumbled upon the problem of how to read user pictures and display them in ImageView. There are a bazillion posts and tutorials on the web, but they all are either needlessly overcomplicated, or aren't doing what is needed - for example, most of them are using ACTION_GET_CONTENT to pick and display a single image from the gallery, instead of reading them all in sequence and displaying as they come.

So, for my fellow Android developers, here is the absolute easiest and quickest way to read and display user gallery on Android phones using nothing but cursors.

1. Get the data into cursor:

Cursor cc = this.getContentResolver().query(MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, null, null, null,null);

2. Get the contents of _DATA (!) field from it (not ID as some posts suggest), which contains the actual physical path to the file.

int i_data = cc.getColumnIndex("_data"); String s_data = cc.getString(i_data);

3. Decode the bitmap and assign to ImageView

Bitmap b = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(s_data); im.setImageBitmap(b);

That's it! I can't believe it has taken me so much time to figure this out, and I hope this helps someone to avoid wasting as much time as I just have.

A large update to Latest Earthquake Info app today:

• "List" button added, will display all events in the selected region in text form to make it easy to browse.
• Clicking on event in List View will isolate it on the map. To display the rest of events, click on "show all".
• The ad and buttons are now in the opposite ends of the screen so that people don't click on the ad when not intending to do so.
• The size of the icon on the map is now accurately represents the scale of the event, as opposed to 2-sized stars in the previous version (big/small).

Some new screenshots:

The app is available free on Google Play. Feedback, as always, is welcome!