Tech 'O Mania

Digital Sketching: See You On Tumblr

aubykhan — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:29:25 +0000

I’ll be uploading all my sketching/artistic stuff only on Tumblr from now onwards. Here’s the link: http://aubykhan.tumblr.com. See you there!

Digital Sketching: F-16

aubykhan — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 09:22:11 +0000

My first ever take on a fighter plane. F-16 is a real beauty and my personal favorite. Had to research a bit before creating this scene. Done in GIMP using pencil, brush, spray paint and smudge tools. Took around 90 mins to finish this off.

Digital Sketching: Staring at the Moon

aubykhan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:25:21 +0000

An inspiration from http://i40.tinypic.com/qyiank.jpg.

Digital Sketching: Untitled

aubykhan — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:01:05 +0000

Another one using tablet and GIMP. Took around 90 mins. Again a half baked idea but I think I am loving the tablet experience .

Digital Sketching: The Beginning

aubykhan — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:05:29 +0000

Finally got my hands on a tablet! And here’s the first one using that (BAMBOO PEN CTL 460). Again used GIMP, took around 1 hour to complete.

Digital Sketching: In the Woods

aubykhan — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:29:39 +0000

Here’s another one which I just wrapped up. Took almost 90 mins to make. No straight lines and curves. Used brush, smudging and a bit of spray paint tool. No tablets yet so all mouse work once again. Done in GIMP. I didn’t have clear idea how it would look like in the end, just started with a very vague one and ended up like this. There are no leaves on trees which indicates my lack of finishing touches with trees right now so I didn’t draw them at all.

Picking up the brush again!

aubykhan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:20:01 +0000

I have been thinking hard to getting back to my old habit of drawing and sketching stuff. After watching a couple of videos showing how the artists use modern tools to sketch such masterpieces, I got motivated enough to getting back to it, again! Here’s what I came up with just some moments back. I know it looks pathetic, but people do post their hello world thing quite so often . So here’s it, created in GIMP using brush tool, smudging and a bit of cloud filter in the background (don’t have a tablet so I used my mouse to draw this ).

Metro UI–It’s Youtube now!

aubykhan — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:50:36 +0000

While watching some videos on youtube, I noticed a change! Yes, after Android Market following the Microsoft’s Metro UI, it’s now our favorite Youtube that’s following up on the tile based UI that MS introduced with their WP7 release. Now that we’ll going to see Metro UI in Windows 8 (Tablets and PCs) and in Xbox 360, I expect that others will follow the same trend soon.

Heads up to Microsoft for the introducing a simplistic, fast and neat UI for modern devices.

Android App and Game Development– Using Custom Fonts

aubykhan — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:10:57 +0000

Text is one of the most important part of any application or game regardless of the platform it is running on. Without good fonts your overall design doesn’t finish up looking neat.

I was recently making and designing a small fun app for Android (find it here) and I opted to use paper/pencil sort of design for it. I happily designed some backgrounds with paper textures (in GIMP) but eventually I faced a bad situation since Android doesn’t have a font (natively available) that gives a sketchy/handwriting type of look to the text. Without the fonts I liked the app to have, the overall feel of the application would be ruined. I was using libgdx for the main part but one of the screens was build with Android views and layouts. Libgdx does support custom fonts and integrating it was smooth. The problem aroused when I tried to use the same font for the views I was using in the other activity. After a lot of experimenting and surfing on the internet, I got it to work!

So, here’s what you need to do in order to use custom fonts in your apps. Before beginning, let me make this clear that font files are incorporated in your app’s apk. This means that the more larger the font file (.ttf) is the larger your apk will become.

First step – Choose a font! Remember, the font should not be large enough that results in drastically increasing the apk size.
Then, you need to copy its TTF file into the assets folder of your app/game. You can directly put it into this folder or you can also keep a separate folder inside the assets for fonts.
Declare a Typeface instance either globally or inside the function in which you’ll assign this to your controls.
Next, initialize this variable by calling Typeface.createFromAsset function like below:

I made a fonts folder inside the assets folder and the same was specified in the function argument. I found people using and suggesting createFromFile function instead of createFromAsset but that simply didn’t work out for me. So this is what I will recommend to my readers.
Now that you have the Typeface initialized, you can simply assign it to any view that has something to do with fonts or text (EditText, TextView etc). You need to use setTypeface function of the view in order to assign the typeface to that view.

And that’s it! Do get back to me with your queries or if you have other method of achieving this objective in Android apps/games.

Android App and Game Development: Customizing Dialogs –The Easiest Way

aubykhan — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:54:40 +0000

Native dialogs in Android are boring! if you are developing an app having some cool and customized theme then doing something about those dull dialogs is a must. They wouldn’t just compliment the overall look of your application. I faced this kinda scenario recently and while experimenting and trying different suggestions on forums, I finally got around it and made it to work!

First things first, as far as my experience went, AlertDialog is not going to help you here. It just don’t get rid of that black background that is there by default (talking about gingerbread dialogs here). No matter what you do, it’ll always show the black background from behind your image (if you have any). Anyways, to create a custom dialog, we need to create a layout first in a separate xml file. Here’s an example:

This is just a simple layout having a background image that has irregular borders. Now we just need to write a few lines of code in order to make it work:

Here, we are setting the background color to transparent in order to get rid of the default dialog background color. After that, we just need to assign the layout resource to the dialog and that gets the job done.

Notice the resultDlg.getWindow().clearFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_DIM_BEHIND); This will remove the dim effect that makes your parent layout a bit darker. You can also set some additional flags like adding a blurred effect to the background/host activity from which this dialog is invoked. To do this, simply use the addFlags function with FLAG_BLUR_BEHIND flag. Here’s the exact statement:

resultDlg.getWindow().addFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_BLUR_BEHIND);

This will create a very nice blur effect which I find more neat than the original dim effect. And that ends this post here. Feel free to comment and ask questions, I’ll try to answer them as swiftly as I can.