Saturday, December 17, 2011

Quick Calc on Mac

  1. Click on Apps icon - Select calculator Or open spotlight, type calculator and select the first option to launch calculator. Type in your numbers and operators to get the result, seems to be the most used one. 
  2. You can also use Dashboard (by pressing F4) and calculator should be there by default.
  3. BUt the easiest of them if your data isn't very complex is just open spotlight (cmd-space) and type in your data there... For e.g., 3^4*2 and the first result is your answer. :)

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Android/Java Static Code Analysis Tools

Java/Android compilers in itself are very good and give very good warnings to inform about various issues/things done wrong.

Just thought about trying free Static Code Analysis Tools and found the below 2:

  1. FindBugs
  2. PMD
Both have eclipse plugin urls, so you can add the URLs at the software site link and easily add the plugins.

FindBugs
Damn good tool. Install the plugin and then right click on a java/android project. You will find FindBugs Menu. Just click on FindBugs and it gives a very good overview of the review bugs in it's own perspective.

Each of the bugs is categorized by the pattern (you can change the categorization in the toolbar) and it lists all the occurrence of that type in all files in the project under that. 
Clicking on it, it gives a very very good description about what the error is and why that is considered to be an error. It indicates if its just a suggestion or performance issue or style issue.  Some of these were quite new for me and the explanation made me feel good to have learn something.
It has mechanisms for marking/filtering out the warnings/bugs we know doesn't make sense in our case -  either file by file or by the pattern type.
It gives a handy way to save the results in XML format too.

All in all, a professional tool/plugin which does it job well.  

PMD 
I wasn't very impressed with this tool. Similar features of finding issues as FindBugs but gives issues in file by file manner. One useful feature is "Find Duplicate Code" which might be useful in some cases but not when you have various design levels for same data objects and it says code is repeating in the classes.

Do you use any other tool which you have been impressed with? Do share it in comments.

Cross posted from: http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2011/12/androidjava-static-code-analysis-tools.html

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Open Terminal window here - Mac OS X

It isn't as easy as updating registry key in windows (or atleast I don't know). Found this link to be good source for app to do that.

https://sites.google.com/site/michaelsafyan/software-engineering/open-in-terminal
Chose the one with customized terminal window icon.
If the folder Finder doesn't exist in your 'Application Support' directory, then do create it.

If you have any other easy ways of doing this, let me know.

Mac DVD Not visible in Finder

In MAC, the dvd drive gets listed in finder only if a dvd is present. Else it's hidden.
In some rare cases, even after you inserted a drive, the disk might not be visible in finder and since there is no eject hardware button near the DVD, there doesn't seem to be a way for removing the disk.

Browsing around, found the following ways (from multiple sources) to eject the disk and re-insert it:

  1. Force restart finder.
  2. Open disk utilities (Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility) and the drive should be available there. Right click on it and select eject.
  3. Command line always rocks. Run the following in a terminal: drutil tray eject

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Eclipse: Removing Todo: Auto-Generated comments

When you use Eclipse menus to create new class, constructor, method or even add a try/catch, typically it not only generates the functionality but also adds a TODO. This is good to indicate that the comment has to be replaced with a proper functionality.

However in a team environment, it's not easy to make people delete the line and add the code. Task remains and it becomes difficult to delete it at the end.

To remove the auto addition of that comment line, you have to follow the below steps:
Goto Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Code Style -> Code Templates
Click on Method Body.
Click Edit.
Remove the commented line. (Something like: // ${todo} Auto-generated method stub)
Click Apply.
Repeat the steps for other elements.

Click save.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Open javadoc in external browser - Eclipse

Solution:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4413883/how-to-open-attached-javadoc-in-external-browser

Should we do this for each workspace?

Function key on aluminium keyboards - MAC

Seen that many people do not find the Fn key in the new aluminium keyboard for mac and end up setting "use default functionality of function keys" in system preferences. However this affects the laptop keys too and might not be preferred by all.

Solution: There IS a function key in the keyboard. Not in the place we expect it though. Look for the key under F13. :-)

Opening multiple instances of Eclipse on mac.

Double clicking on eclipse icon always opens the same instance on MAC. To solve this, you can open terminal (Command-Space to launch spotlight. Type in terminal and click on the top hit/Terminal link).
Cd to the place where you unzipped eclipse.
For .e.g, Eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/


Then run eclipse &. (& makes sure you run eclipse in background, so that you can kill the terminal window.).