Design application icon using Inkscape

Here's the tutorial on the easy way to make icon (Android App icon in this case).

We programmers suck at graphic design, which is why in Google Play you can find lots of icons drawn with MS Paint or something like that :)

While we will never be good at this thing, it doesn't mean we have to settle with sub-par icons. In this post I will show you how I made this icon in Inkscape using only a few basic drawing tools, all in about 15 minutes.  It's not that good compared to the professionally-made ones, but I think it looks better that a lots of icons on Google Play.

There are 7 steps to go from nothing to the image above. 

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Using Synctoy and dropbox for quick and dirty backup

SyncToy is a free tool from Microsoft that synchronize two folders.  However, I found that it is very convenient to have a quick backup of a folder when using it with dropbox.

Simply setup SyncToy so that your local folder to be backup is a "left folder", and the Dropbox folder is the "light folder".

While backup a folder like this doesn't help you if you want a file that has been overwritten, but it is a quick way to make sure you have one copy of your file somewhere in case of, say, notebook get stolen.

What I usually do is to synchronize my folder with dropbox using SyncToy before I start working with files in that folder.  If I mess up, I can pull those files back from dropbox.  Once I'm done and sure that the previous versions of those files are no longer needed, I simply sync them again.

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Pixeur Color Picker

Pixeur is my favorite color picker for its simplicity, and a nice feature.  To pick to color, you drag the target (that circle thing just above the About button) over the spot where you want to get the values of its color.  At the top, there is a small zoom window that magnify the array the target is on top, so even when you want to pick a color of a 1-pixel line, you can do it accurately.

Pixeur is available on Windows, for 98 to 7.

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tmetaDict, an English -> Thai dictionary

tmetaDict was my little project meant to be a hand-on programming project teaching myself the mobile phone programming, but it becomes quite successful (being a free app helps).   There has been more than 400K downloads so far for the BlackBerry version.  The Android version is just a month-old, with about a thousand users.

If you are Thai, or learning Thai language, tmetaDict will help.  It is different from other Eng->Thai dictionary apps in the way it is designed and coded.  It is very fast (for programmers out there, the database on disk is a flatten binary search tree that maintains its tree structure, so accessing the database is very fast without needing to load and store the database in the memory).  It also comes with a spell checking and spell correction which is very useful since typing on virtual keyboard is not very accurate.  The spell checking and correction is based on Levenstein distance algorithm.  Levenstein algorithm is quite slow, so tmetaDict uses a few heuristic functions to speed things up.  Together with fast database access, the result is almost real-time checking and translation.

If you are interested, check out http://www.tmetadict.com or you can download tmetaDict directly on Google Play

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Redcard Referee 2014 is a free, silly little program for android that let you be your own referee, eject people off the game, soccer style!


With RedCard 2014, you can SWIPE or SHAKE your phone to rotate between 4 screens:
- Yellow card
- Red card
- Talk-to-my-hand
- Nah-uh

Screen comes animations and sound effects, and you even change it to fit your style using text-to-speech.  It is available at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tmeta.redcard

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