Month: April 2012

Beginning JavaScript and jQuery Development – IDE

Draineh Leave a comment

C, C++ and Python development is something I have done for a while over the past few years now with some professional and academic experience. This has seen me through a lot of projects but now the time has come to expand to web technologies! I’m already good with HTML and CSS so the next step is JavaScript and jQuery, to do this I’m going to need a new integrated development environment (IDE).

Meet Aptana

Its a fully featured web development IDE that’s based on Eclipse, which if you’ve read my previous posts you will already know it is my preferred IDE.

Aptana suppports HTML, CSS and JavaScript code assistance along with PHP and Ruby, an integrated debugger for Ruby and JavaScript and also git integration if you use git for your project management.
Oh and a fair bit more. It also has the decent dark background, eerie colour scheme that I and so many others enjoy when developing.

I will write up a proper review and how-to once I’ve had time to give it a proper test run and put it through its paces, but first I’m going to need to learn some JavaScript! 🙂

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Android OS Killing Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) Battery – UPDATE

Draineh 7 Comments

My last update went through some troubleshooting steps I took to identify a disabled service that was causing my Android Samsung Galaxy S2 battery to rapidly drain since installing the Ice Cream Sandwich update. After making the changes described in the last post the battery seemed to last longer, but I was still experiencing poor charge hold times.
During my troubleshooting I also fired off an email to Samsung support which I did eventually receive a reply to, the response was surprisingly frank and honest. Essentially the reply stated that the battery my phone came with was not up to the challenge of running the latest update to Android (Ice cream sandwich AKA ICS). In the same email they also offered to post me a brand new battery that would be up to the job if I replied with my serial and IMEI details.

If you have a Samsung Galaxy S2 and you’re experiencing problems with the latest update then get in touch with Samsung here on their “My Samsung” support pages. I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the battery being shipped with the S2 at the moment so the newer models hopefully won’t be afflicted in the same way. Certainly if you have an older model, and mine is from one of the first batches released, then you should definitely get in touch with Samsung support and hopefully you’ll get the same straight response that I did.

In the meantime, I discovered today that if you desperately need your phone to last at least the day then switch off the data network by holding the power button down until you are presented with a menu, from here select “Data network mode” and confirm that you want to disable it when asked.

Battery usage screenshot

The screenshot above illustrates how rapidly my battery dropped and then how the red line literally lasted hours until I was able to get it back on charge, pretty useful considering I needed the phone today.

Update: Read here for an update on how to fix the battery draining problem!

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