Chrome: adding shortcuts to bookmarks

In Firefox you can associate shortcuts to your bookmarks, which I used to:

• quickly open frequently used sites, e.g. Gmail, Facebook, etc. or
• to open a page with a specific topic, e.g. the Wikipedia article about "Linux" or
• to trigger a custom search or query, e.g. on Google Translate

Now that I recently switched from Firefox to Chrome I imported my Firefox bookmarks and still had the shortcuts available, but when I edited my bookmarks I couldn't find the option to modify the shortcuts, neither could I add new shortcuts.

After playing around a while I finally found something called "Search Engines", which is a bit of a misleading name, but does exactly the same as bookmark shortcuts in Firefox.

You get there by right clicking on the URL bar / search bar and selecting Edit Search Engines...

Now, when you click on Add you get a form like this, where Keyword is the shortcut you use in the address bar, URL the site where you wanna go with %s as a placeholder for your search term.

In this case to get to the Wikipedia article for "Linux" I would just have to enter "wiki Linux" in the address bar and I get directly there. 

In case you wanna go to a static URL like Gmail you just don't use the %s placeholder and enter the URL completely.

Andoid: Eclipse error "Conversion to Dalvik format failed"

If you receive this error in Eclipse when compiling large .java files or using big .jar libraries

[2009-03-30 17:28:14 - Dex Loader] Unable to execute dex: null
[2009-03-30 17:28:14 - MyProject] Conversion to Dalvik format failed: 
Unable to execute dex: null 

then add the following to your eclipse.ini and the problem should be fixed:

-Xms128m
-Xmx512m

Still problems? Increase these values and try again.

iPhone: debugging EXC_BAD_ACCESS errors

After developing for iPhone and Android for quite some time now I consider myself an advanced developer on both these mobile platforms. But even though I left the beginner stage, sometimes things still don't work as they should (or at least as I expected) and I thought sharing some of my learning experiences would help other developers to lessen their pain.

One of the biggest pains (besides Objective-C itself) is definitely the memory management on the iPhone. Luckily we don't have this problems on Android, due to the fact of using Java and garbage collection, which makes programming an ease (almost!) and enables you to focus on creating something rather than wasting a lot of time debugging. However, Apple decided not to include garbage collection for the iPhone, even though it's available within their frameworks and is actually used for Mac development. I won't elaborate much more on the pros and cons of Objective-C's memory management and the object ownership concept, since a lot of other bloggers ranted about that topic already too many times before me, but rather give you some useful tips to reduce the time you spend debugging.

The most common problem you will have is probably an EXC_BAD_ACCESS error, which occurs when you try to release memory that has already been released. This could be the reason if for example you try

• to release an object, which you don't own
• to release an object, which is in the autorelease pool
• to release an object, which has the "assign" property instead of "retain"

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Swype beta for Android

After having been using the leaked version of Swype for a while, I'm happy to hear that they finally provide an official beta for Android.

If you haven't heard about Swype, yet, it's an innovate new way of rapidly entering text on mobile touch screen devices.

I highly recommend that you give it a try. I cannot image going back to the standard Android or iPhone keyboard, even though they're pretty good themselves. Check out this video comparing Swype with a standard touch keyboard.

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