Git

Learning git, finally.  I've been using TFS and things like it (subversion) for a number of years now.  When it comes to source control and builds, I'm definitely a believer in the critical importance of them.  On the current contract job I'm doing, they told me they couldn't get me a TFS build for my project on their build server, because of blah blah.  To me, that's like asking a pilot to fly without all his instruments being functional.  You wouldn't do it, it's a safety violation.  So I had to turn my own workstation into a build server using TeamCity (free).

Anyway, I'm getting my new project, AR, all framed out and setup on github.  And I have to say, there is a bit of a learning curve.  But I'm plugging away at it. It's important to me that the source code that's in source control always builds and has its unit tests all green and happy.  Yeah, I'm kinda anal like that.

So I did some coding on AR this morning. This OCR library that I found, tesseract (http://gaut.am/making-an-ocr-android-app-using-tesseract/), was a little more unwieldy than I had hoped.  I'm spoiled by all the free libraries that I can add from NuGet in a couple of keystrokes.  For this OCR lib, I had to download the open source from GitHub, and then get CygWin  and the Android NDK, and actually get it to build.  Then I had to import the module into my Android project in IntelliJ.  I really wanted to just reference a jar file, but I ended up checking all this code in to source once I got it building and working.

So doing OCR is apparently very processor intensive.  It probably makes sense to farm the work out to a server somewhere, but I'm doing it right on the phone.  My big stride I made this morning was putting that work into an IntentService and getting it off the GUI thread.  Yea!

After that, I decided to see if my source base was actually valid.  So I downloaded the code from GitHub to a different location on my machine and built and ran.  It built and ran.  It also crashed when I ran it.  So I used Beyond Compare to compare the folders of my working version versus my freshly checked out version, and I found some libs folder under this tesseract OCR library that I hadn't checked in.  The .gitignore file screened out the folder.  Apparently this native android code business does some runtime linking or something.

So that's the update.  It's going a little slow but I'm moving forward.