Android - a new year

One of my New Year's resolutions is, to develop Android applications, again.

I plan to develop for the Android users some useful and cool applications. As I think these might just be useful for other smartphone users as well, such as iPhone, Blackberry, and so on, I have decided to use PhoneGap.

This is a very promising framework for developing mobile applications, platform indenpendently. I am just through with the tutorial for Android applications using Eclipse. And I am pleasantly surprised.

No hidden tricks, everything went just fine.

Check out the tutorial yourself:

Metahint - intuitive site search

Metahint is the clever search extension for your website. It is still in Beta, but it is definitely worth trying it out.

Just start typing in the search box on the top-right side of my page, and you will see how easier it is for you to find content you need within my blog. You even get search-hints! And that is so far the best part of it. I think the part which could really make it useful is if it could be integrated as a plugin in Mozilla, making the indexed page accessible not only by installing a widget.

Let's put it like this: it is way better than Google's site search. You can get the widget from metahint.com. Definitely makes site search more fun!

Fixing Rails - Ajax charset issues

If you are developing a Rails applications with Ajax for an other language than the english, and you need to use the special characters like ä, ö, ü, you may have the unpleasant surprise to experience getting unreadable characters on your HTML page.
This problem is a little pain in the ass, as it took me a couple of hours to get more understanding of it. The problem was not that their aren't many posts talking about the problem and offering many solutions, but none worked for me. I found useful this post, and this one. Go through these posts if you still don't know what the problem is about.

The solution that worked for me:

before_filter :set_charset
def set_charset
  str_type = request.xhr? ? 'javascript' : 'html'
  headers['Content-Type'] = "text/#{str_type}; charset=ISO-8859-1"
end