Our offices will be closed from December 24, 2010 and will reopen on January 3, 2011. We look forward to seeing you next year!

The details: each of our fabulous designers (and a last minute submission by our intern, Kyle) took it upon themselves to create a gift wrap design that would later be printed and mailed to our clients and contacts, some past and some present. Once their designs were finalized and sent to print, various team members took on copywriting roles (in a very creative way, I might add) and starting fitting the pieces together to create what would become our newest Zoom Creates microsite. Our development team used their mad skills and superhero talents to create us a site that flowed beautifully in line with our wrap. From there, our packages were prepped, envelopes were stuffed with care, and they were on their way to bring Zoom-tastic cheer to our friends near and far. An eblast bringing additional good cheer went out today and the rest is holiday history!

Don’t take my word for it! You can experience our take on the holidays for yourself! From all of us to all of you, happiest holidays. Stay cool and keep wrapping.

www.zoomcreates.com/wrap

We are definitely not ones to toot our own horn, that’s not the purpose of this post. However, there were some alarming statistics that were so impactful we ended up choosing OFB. We share these with you so that maybe, if you are looking for somewhere to give back to, you may be inspired to give to the Oregon Food Bank, too!

• 73 percent of surveyed households had incomes below the federal poverty level ($22,050 for a family of four). That compares to 67 percent in 2008.
• 64 percent of households with children had incomes below the federal poverty level.
• 29 percent of households had incomes below 50 percent of the poverty level ($11,025 for a family of four).
• 31 percent of surveyed households listed long-term unemployment as the reason they sought emergency food. That compares to 22 percent in 2008 at the beginning of the recession.
• 28 percent of adult recipients are unemployed and looking for work, compared to 20 percent in 2008.
• The average length of time of unemployment was 15 months.
• Due to an unprecedented recession, demand for emergency food remains at historic levels.
• An average of 240,000 people eat meals from emergency food boxes each month. Of those, 33 percent are children.
• 16 percent of adult recipients work full time, compared to 21 percent in 2008.
• 52 percent of respondents cite “to be employed” as critical to improving their situation. That compares to 45 percent in 2008.

Without belaboring the point, the facts listed above made today’s poverty, unemployment and overall need very real for us. With the economy the way it is and unemployment running out, many families are genuinely struggling to get by. When 64% of families with children have an income below the federal poverty line, there’s definitely a need for assistance from those of us more fortunate.

The bottom line is this: our communities need us and it takes very little to make a big difference, so if you are out and about this year, pick up a bag of canned goods and drop them at any Jiffy Lube in the Portland area. If we all pitch in just a little, we can truly make an impact on those who have run across hard times, some for the first time ever. It takes a village!

More info here.

Most beginner tutorials out there that I found over the last few weeks have just regurgitated the Hello World demo app from Google. I found that pretty useless, because Google has a perfectly fine demo on how to print text to the screen. I set out to build a little app that displays an image, has button, can update the screen, and gives user feedback (I used the vibration feature of my phone). I even had enough time to set up a basic options menu, so that will be in this tutorial too.

I won’t be covering how to set up your development IDE, as Google has done a great job with that too. I followed the tutorial on setting up the Android API in Eclipse, and was up and running without a hitch in about 30 minutes (there was a lot to download). I developed this app on Ubuntu 10.04, but I’m pretty sure that you can use this code on any platform. Click through to get started!

At the bottom of this post you will see a Zip file that is the full project folder. Extract it into your Eclipse workspace, or just follow along. I’ll try to be as clear as I can, so let’s get started.

My project is named Zoom Demo, with a Build Target of Android 1.5. The Application name is also Zoom Demo, and has a package name of “com.zoomcreates.android.demo”. The activity is the name of your main class, and appropriately I named it “demo”. To set these up, choose File > New > Project…, and choose Android Project from the Android section in the Wizards box.

This will set up your source tree automagically, and include in a couple of files and directories needed to compile. The main Java code is located in the src folder, under the package name. It should be named the same as your main Activity, so in my case it is called demo.java. Here is the finished code for this app:

package com.zoomcreates.android.demo;
 
import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.os.Vibrator;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuItem;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.ImageButton;
import android.widget.TextView;
 
public class demo extends Activity
	implements View.OnClickListener {
		/** Called when the activity is first created. */
		ImageButton atomBtn;
		TextView textWidget;
		Vibrator v;
 
		@Override
		public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {
			super.onCreate(icicle);
 
			v = (Vibrator)getSystemService(Context.VIBRATOR_SERVICE);
 
	        setContentView(R.layout.main);
 
	        atomBtn = (ImageButton)findViewById(R.id.atomBtn);
	        atomBtn.setOnClickListener(this);
 
	        textWidget = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textWidget); 
 
	        updateText();
		}
 
		@Override
		public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
			super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
 
			MenuItem item = menu.add("Clear Zooms");
			item.setIcon(R.drawable.edit);
 
			item = menu.add("Quit App");
			item.setIcon(R.drawable.exit);
 
			return true;
		}
 
		@Override
		public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
			if (item.getTitle() == "Clear Zooms") {
				textWidget.setText("");
			}
 
			if (item.getTitle() == "Quit App") {
				finish();
			}
			return true;
		}
 
		public void onClick(View view) {
			updateText();
		}
 
		public void updateText() {
			textWidget.setText(textWidget.getText() + "Zoom... ");
			v.vibrate(300);
		}
 
}

Let’s break that down some…

package com.zoomcreates.android.demo;
 
import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.os.Vibrator;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuItem;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.ImageButton;
import android.widget.TextView;

Here we define our package name, and import all the android goodies that we need. The package line should have been created for you, and you shouldn’t have to touch it. A few imports have been set up for you too, but Eclipse is pretty nice and lets you know if your are trying to do something that requires an include. I added these in when Eclipse told me too, and these are all the includes needed for my app.

public class demo extends Activity
	implements View.OnClickListener {
		/** Called when the activity is first created. */
		ImageButton atomBtn;
		TextView textWidget;
		Vibrator v;

Here is where our main Activity is declared. Since I have the main Activity returning button clicks to itself, I had it implement View.OnClickListener, so it can respond to button clicks. Next are three variable declarations, atomBtn, textWidget and v.

		@Override
		public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {
			super.onCreate(icicle);
 
			v = (Vibrator)getSystemService(Context.VIBRATOR_SERVICE);
 
			setContentView(R.layout.main);
 
			atomBtn = (ImageButton)findViewById(R.id.atomBtn);
			atomBtn.setOnClickListener(this);
 
			textWidget = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textWidget); 
 
			updateText();
		}

Each Activity has an onCreate event, and we are overriding the default to give it some functionality. You can ignore that Bundle icicle for now, just pass it to the super.onCreate method and we can move right on.

Next I tell v to be a Vibrator System Service, so we can make the phone shake. setContentView is being passed R.layout.main which is an XML file that describes the layout of the app. atomBtn is an ImageButton, which gets its info from that same XML file and then we set its onClickListener to the app. textWidget is also found in that XML file, and the last thing that we do is call the public method updateText(). Next we have…

		@Override
		public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
			super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
 
			MenuItem item = menu.add("Clear Zooms");
			item.setIcon(R.drawable.edit);
 
			item = menu.add("Quit App");
			item.setIcon(R.drawable.exit);
 
			return true;
		}
 
		@Override
		public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
			if (item.getTitle() == "Clear Zooms") {
				textWidget.setText("");
			}
 
			if (item.getTitle() == "Quit App") {
				finish();
			}
			return true;
		}

… two more overrides for normal android apps. Here I am building a menu. This is only one way to do this, as you can define your menu in a layout XML file, but I wanted to show both ways of building UI elements in this tutorial. So I pass menu (which is a Menu) to the onCreateOptionsMenu method. This is what Android considers to be an Application Menu, and you can see this when you tap the menu button on the phone. I then declare item as a MenuItem, and add “Clear Zooms” as the title of this item. Next line addes the icon edit.png to this menu item (R.drawable.edit). That icon is found in the drawable folder, and make sure that you don’t put the file extention when declaring the icon. Then I add another menu item titled “Quit App” and give it that icon.

The next method actually tells the app what do to when those menu items are clicked. I check against the item title, because it was easy to see what I set those as. When you click on “Clear Zooms”, the textWidget gets set back to an empty string. When you click “Quit App”, it calls finish(), which quits the program gracefully.

Because these methods are boolean methods, I return true to finish them both off.

		public void onClick(View view) {
			updateText();
		}
 
		public void updateText() {
			textWidget.setText(textWidget.getText() + "Zoom... ");
			v.vibrate(300);
		}
 
}

The last two methods are the onClick, which only calls the method updateText, and this is being called by the ImageButton. updateText both appends “Zoom… ” to our textWidget, and tells the phone to vibrate for 300 milliseconds. Then we close out the main Activity, demo, with that last curly brace.

So, that is all that we need as far as Java code goes. I mentioned an XML layout file. Every Android app uses XML layouts to figure out display items, and lay them out correctly. You can use different GUI builders to generate the XML you need, but it’s pretty easy to do by hand too. I didn’t really do that great of a job with this program’s layout, as I was more focusing on the java. I knew that my phone had an 480×800 screen, so I made a background image that was that size, and I knew that my button was 250 pixels wide, so 75 pixels of padding would put it near the center of the screen.

So, the layout XML file is located in the “res” folder of your project source tree, inside another folder called “layout”. It is named main.xml, and here is what mine looks like:

I used an Absolute layout so that different items could overlay each other. I have 3 elements in this xml file, the first being an ImageView that is the background image. It is delcared first, so it’s drawn on the bottom. The next element is an ImageButton with the id of atomBtn, which you hopefully remember from the Java code above. These usually come with a gray background that makes it look like a button, but I got rid of that by making a small transparent PNG and setting that to the android:background attribute. Last we have the TextView with the id textWidget, and I set the color to #333333.

Each of my PNG images for this app go inside the /res/drawable folder, and the included one called icon.png is the application icon you see on the phone. I overwrote the default to give it some extra polish.

There were only two things left that I needed to do. First, to get access to the vibration of a phone, you need to set the PERMISSIONS for that in the AndroidManifest. Also, I wanted this ap to run full screen, without the status bar or title bar, so I added a theme to the application that is set up to do just that. Here’s my AndroidManifest.xml. Note the <uses-permission> element and the android:theme attribute of the <activity> element.

Wow. Okay, that was a lot. As promised, here is the zip file containing this project. If you just want to see the demo app in action, here is the .apk file so you can install it on your android phone. Note, you do have to enable applications from outside the Android Market to install this.

For more info, check out these links to help with Android App development:
Installing the SDK
Reference Docs
Simple vibration demo
Creating a menu from XML instead of in the Java code

This year was a little different. In the past four years, there were strict traditional rules; weight limit; length limit; no propulsion, etc.. This year the rules were open to interpretation. There was no weight limit. Cars could be no longer than 8 inches—at the start of the race. Any non-flammable forms of propulsion were allowed. It was crazy. There was a remote controlled, gear-driven car, a remote controlled propeller-driven car, a rubber band propeller driven car, a wind-up spring driven car, and the winning CO2 propelled rocket car. There were also a handful of good old gravity driven cars. Mine was one of the latter.

This year, I decided to do make a model of KITT, the 1983 Pontiac Trans-Am driven by Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) in the 1980′s TV show, Knight Rider. I got the idea when I saw a Tiny Cylon Kit at sparkfun.com back in February. Kurtis, who was allegedly too busy to build a car this year, offered to help me modify and install the lights from this kit into my car so it could be used as a functioning scanner in the front of the car. Well, before I knew it, it was July and I had not ordered the Tiny Cylon Kit or (just like every other year) started building my car. I decided to forgo the  functioning lights due to the time constraints.

I modeled up the car in Illustrator then printed and cut out paper templates. I needed to add some width and height to the original block of wood. I measured and cut out wheel wells and glued pieces of wood to the original block.

I took this modified block of wood along with my templates to Tim’s house and used his mini table saw and belt sander to cut out the rough shape of the car. I then build the hood scoop and spoiler out of thin plywood and glued them into place, cut out the scanner notch and drew the hood, lights and door lines. I also hollowed out a compartment underneath to hold the weight.

Then I primed and sanded and primed and sanded.

Then spray painted him gloss black.

While the paint dried, I cut the lights out of colored paper and drew the license plate in Illustrator. For the windows, I printed out a subtle gradient that would match my diorama. I cut these out of paper and spray mounted them to clear vellum and glued them to the car.

For the diorama, I found a photo of El Mirage Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert in California, added a better sky, adjusted the colors to look like an old TV whose color is going out, printed it out and mounted it to some foam core. I left a curve in the transition from horizontal to vertical to try and create the illusion of a seamless background.

All that was left to do was prepare the wheels and axles. I cannot reveal my technique for axle prep but can reveal that it involves a file, sandpaper, steel wool and a few other secret ingredients. For the wheels, I used a silver Sharpie to draw a thin silver ring where the tire meets the rim and colored the head of the axle (nail) black. I also made an iron-on KITT HAPPENS T-shirt to wear to the derby.

After aligning the wheels I added the weight, polished it up and took it to the race where it placed 5th overall out of  24. Not too bad considering.

Last week O’Reilly put on the 2010 Open Source Convention (OSCON) here in Portland. The Zoom Dev team took Thursday morning to check it out. There were many exciting open source projects on display, and SWAG everywhere! We through caution and our identities to the wind and dropped business cards in jars and filled out forms for drawings. By lunch time, we returned to the office with bags full of t-shrits, coffee mugs, pins, pens, toys, and papers. It was a great way to spend the morning: talk about nerdy stuff with other geeks, and have something to wear for the next day. After a start like that, productivity was pretty much shot for the second half of the day, but we managed to get some work done… until we started getting phone calls for the forms we filled out and business cards we dropped. But the calls were not sales calls. Amazingly, in addition to the generous SWAG we hauled back to the office, we won three smartphones!

Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC), whose focus is on integrating software and hardware on mobile devices, had a drawing to win one of ten HTC Droid Incredible phones. Both Justin and I won that drawing. And Symbian, the company that manages the operating system on Nokia phones, had a drawing to win one of three Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone. I won that drawing too. Not bad for a days work!

Thanks, O’Reilly, Qualcomm, and Symbian for the gifts and for your support of open source projects! OSCON is coming back to Portland next year, so be sure to check it out!

If you combine a super cool kitchen/wine gadget with an idea that sprung out of a great mind that we know and love… you can imagine the heart and soul that went into this project. Long story short: Torkscrew and it’s parent company, BellaSvago, is growing and making their mark on the world. Enter The Tasting Panel magazine, whose May 2010 issue features a full page editorial outlining the  Torkscrew Story and touches on the minds behind the brand (that’s US). Please enjoy.

Speaking of coins and chance, I threw together a game of chance (inspired by a lottery game) to help save some of the Zoomers some coin when we go out for lunch. Hey guys – practice your probability predictions on this game. Or just save your money and watch!

Here’s the FLA for this game: zeno.fla

For instance, brown was never the “New Black” for me, it was just brown. Chickens, on the other hand, now those were a fad I just couldn’t pass up.

Fluffy Yellow Chicks? I’ll take 5 of those Silver Laced Wyandotte’s please! We’re allowed to have 3 hens, but I figured there might be some natural attrition. I also allowed for human error that 1 or 2 might turn out to be Roosters. We watched in awe as the chicks went from fluffy, to gawky to beautiful. Well, all but one of them. I would stand out by the run watching them, the sun glinting magically off their iridescent tail feathers and remark to my partner “Baby, they’re so pretty! Except that one, why is she so ugly?” And then, one day, we heard a tentative, garbled Rrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr. The ugly one, it turned out was our only hen.

Four out of Five chicks were roosters! What are the odds? And still, we sallied forth. You see, we were committed to the chickens now. $350.00 for a coop (some assembly required) $300 for lumber and chicken wire for their run. $30.00 for a heat lamp, $27.00 for an electronic thermometer to ensure they stayed toasty warm. Organic feed, feeder, waterer, litter, scratch. It all adds up. Not to mention the emotional investment of hand-raising them from chicks. Once the “Rooster Issue” was addressed, we found three replacements, a few weeks younger than our existing hen. They were big, strapping Jersey Giants, earning their name by the amount of food they consumed. All appeared to be well, until a Sunday morning in November “Rrrrrr-rrrrrr-rrrrr” we looked at each other horror stricken. Not again? Why us? Sure enough, one of the Giant Jersey Chickens was a Rooster.

The week of Christmas, my partner came to me “Close your eyes and hold out your hand” she said with a glint in her eye. What was this? An early bauble she couldn’t wait to give me? No, it was a beautiful brown egg. Success, finally. To date, we have received 11 such gifts.

Determination, commitment, resolve – All of these are key in achieving the end goal, whatever it may be. Egg self sufficiency, driving more traffic to your website, increasing your market presence, hammering down your brand.

Using Mrs. Knightly’s Chicken Analogy, let’s break it down, shall we?

Before you run out and buy a bunch of chicks, you need a coop (Brand) for them to live in, once that’s in place, you need an appropriately sized Run (brand guidelines) where the chickens can do what they do best. And now, you buy the chickens (Collateral, Web & Marketing). They should reflect the values, aesthetics and flavor of your coop (Brand), because they are an integral part in the end goal.

• Coop – Check
• Run – Check
• Chickens – Check

Oh. Small detail. You’ve got to feed the chickens so they’ll produce. You can have the most beautiful coop, run and chickens in the world, but if you forget to feed (market and adapt) them, they will not survive. To keep them really healthy, they need friends (Social Media connections) and a change of scenery (Refresh & Revise) every so often.

Next week, we’ll talk about the Perfect Omelet (Results).

Happy New Years!

Mrs. Knightly