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