Beach Villas
On a variety of holidays we have come across a wide range of interesting development opportunities. Irish rural retreat near Cahir, Ireland. Some rethatching required. Pretty Welsh country cottage near Caerphilly, UK. Natural slate roof. On the beach at Zahora, Costa de Luz, Spain. This has since been turned into a beach bar. The lighthouse at Trafalgar can be seen in the distance. Country cottage near Olveira, Galicia, Spain. Sturdy chimney.
Read more →Flutter app bar search widget
As an exercise I decided to reimplement my Buses app in flutter. To do this I need an open street map library, a beautiful soup library, a location library, an OS ref library, and a search widget. All of these are available in pub.dev, except a suitable search widget. All implementations of SearchBar in the docs include an annoying dropdown suggestions feature, which appears to be mandatory. However it is possible to take the SearchBar and include it in an AppBar, change the icons and end up with something which looks and acts very similarly to an android search widget.
Read more →Android Navigation Menu
Android versions from android 5 use a Toolbar as the ActionBar, but there appears to be no obvious API access. However, by traversing the view hierarchy, it can be found and used to set up app navigation. Create a recursive function to traverse the views and find the toolbar. // findToolbar private Toolbar findToolbar(ViewGroup group) { View result = null; final int count = group.getChildCount(); for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) { View view = group.
Read more →Update App Widget
Android app widgets normally can be set up to update periodically, but not repeatedly for a short period. For a bus times app I need the widget to update every 30 seconds for about 5 minutes. I already had a Service set up to update the widget from a suitable web site and using a Handler to reset the progress bar if the background update process failed. public static final int RESET_DELAY = 5 * 1000; public static final int REPEAT_DELAY = 30 * 1000; public static final int STOP_DELAY = 5 * 60 * 1000; private Handler handler; private boolean stopUpdate; // onCreate @Override public void onCreate() { // Get handler handler = new Handler(Looper.
Read more →Turkey Cabbage Wraps
Our neighbour has been giving us large kale–like leaves from his purple sprouting broccoli plants, which are quite tasty. I decided to look up what could be done with large cabbage leaves and decided on wraps with a tomato sauce over the top. Ingredients 250g minced turkey thigh An onion, finely chopped A garlic clove, crushed A carrot, grated 50g porridge oats Small stick of celery, chopped A mushroom, chopped finely An egg Black pepper Olive oil Enough cabbage leaves for six wraps A jar of pasta sauce or tin of chopped tomatoes Grated cheese for topping Method Cut the tough stems out of the leaves and cook them gently in just enough water until limp enough to wrap around the ingredients.
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