“To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can’t see it.” via codinghorror.com

“It’s been about a month since the last update to Bugify. I’d like to have an update out every 2 to 3 weeks while the app is still reasonably young, but that didn’t happen this month sorry. The biggest thing I’ve been working on lately is the new permissions system – which is not a simple addition. The last thing I wanted was a bulky permissions system that slows the app down, so it’s a lot of work trying to get it right.” via blog.bugify.com

To link an issue to another in Bugify, you simply need to reference the ticket in a comment, or in the issue description. For example, you could write “We need to get #123 finished first”. This would do two things: first, you would be able to click on the “#123″ and go straight to that ticket, and second, Bugify would asynchronously scan the ticket for links to other tickets. When it finds a link from #456 to #123, it creates a “link” from both #456 to #123, and from #123 to #456 (reciprocal linking). You’ll see the related issues on the side bar, and if something’s not right, it’s a single click to remove the link (every time you update an issue, it will scan for links, so you’ll need to remove the reference to the other ticket if you don’t want the link added back in again). And, of course you can also access the list of related issues through the API.

Date Format Key:
YYYY – The year (the first two digits/century can be omitted).
MM – The month of the year, from 1 to 12.
DD – The day of the month, from 1 to 31.
hh – The hour of the day, from 0 to 23.
mm – The minute of the hour, from 0 to 59.

You should already have the Android SDK installed, so these instructions make that assumption. You also need your Android phone plugged in via USB with USB Debugging enabled.

Open Terminal, and change to your Android SDK folder, open the “tools” folder, here you should see a tool named “ddms” (this stands for Davlik Debug Monitor). Run this tool from the Terminal and the Debug Monitor app will open up.

When the app has opened, go to the Device menu and select Screen Capture.

You can now take and save screenshots of whatever is running on your Android device.

For information on how to use the API, please read the API information here.

New "Overview" page

Above is the new “Overview” page (you can experience it yourself by trying out the Bugify demo). The idea was to provide a brief overview of where you’re tracking both as an organisation, and as a user. We are pretty happy with it, and find it a vast improvement over the old “Overview” page.

To get the new “Overview” page, simply update your installation of Bugify, or if you don’t have it yet, download Bugify from bugify.com

/**
 * We need to use multiple touch events to handle a "tap" because
 * the google maps api doesn't natively support the touch event.
 */
//Prepare the overlay object so we can use its "fromContainerPixelToLatLng" method
var overlay = new google.maps.OverlayView();
overlay.draw = function() {};
overlay.setMap(this.map.map);

//Prepare the touch vars
this.touches = {
    startX  : 0,
    startY  : 0,
    currentX: 0,
    currentY: 0,
    reset   : function() {
        this.startX   = 0;
        this.startY   = 0;
        this.currentX = 0;
        this.currentY = 0;
    }
};

this.map.el.dom.addEventListener('touchstart', function(e) {
    /**
     * Only deal with single touches (not multi-touch) - when it is multi-touch,
     * the array of touches will have an item for each finger.
     */
    if (e.touches.length == 1) {
        //Remember that the user has started a touch
        this.touches.startX = this.touches.currentX = e.touches[0].clientX;
        this.touches.startY = this.touches.currentY = e.touches[0].clientY;
    }
});

this.map.el.dom.addEventListener('touchmove', function(e) {
    //Only track the current position if we know of the start position
    if (this.touches.startX > 0) {
        //Remember the current position of the finger
        this.touches.currentX = e.touches[0].clientX;
        this.touches.currentY = e.touches[0].clientY;
    }
});

this.map.el.dom.addEventListener('touchend', function(e) {
    //Only track the current position if we know of the start position
    if (this.touches.startX > 0) {
        //Make sure the user hasn't dragged their finger too much
        if (Math.abs(this.touches.currentX - this.touches.startX) < 4 && Math.abs(this.touches.currentY - this.touches.startY) < 4) {
            if (e.changedTouches && e.changedTouches.length > 0) {
                var touch = e.changedTouches[0];

                //Work out the coordinates on the map
                var x = (touch.pageX - this.map.el.dom.offsetParent.offsetLeft),
                    y = (touch.pageY - this.map.el.dom.offsetParent.offsetTop);

                var point  = new google.maps.Point(x, y),
                    latLng = overlay.getProjection().fromContainerPixelToLatLng(point);

                google.maps.event.trigger(this.map.map, 'tapped', {latLng: latLng});
            }
        }
    }

    //Reset the touches
    this.touches.reset();
});

//Allow click events also (for testing in desktop browser)
google.maps.event.addListener(this.map.map, 'click', function(e) {
    google.maps.event.trigger(this.map.map, 'tapped', {latLng: e.latLng});
});

google.maps.event.addListener(this.map.map, 'tapped', function(e) {
    //Add this point to the list of points
    this.routePoints.push({lat: e.latLng.lat(), lng: e.latLng.lng()});

    //Update the lines on the map
    this.displayRoute();

    //Calculate the distance etc
    this.calculateStats();

    //Save the current trip details (for page reloads)
    this.saveTrip();
});