Google Services on the Amazon Fire HD 8

  • December 13, 2015
  • James Skemp
xda-developers has a post, Installing Google Framework/Playstore without Root (5th Gen Amazon Fire 2015), that includes a couple different sets of instructions. What worked for me was grabbing the mega.nz zip download and then: Make sure you're a developer and you allow apps from unknown sources. Install ES File Explorer via the Amazon Appstore. It's something I install on all my Android devices. Extract the contents of the zip you downloaded from Mega somewhere.

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July 2015 tablet recommendations

  • August 29, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following is an email I sent on July 23, 2015, to someone who was looking to purchase her first tablet. It's now a month out of date, but I hope it helps someone, or is historically interesting. Fair warning this is a long email, but you don't have to read it all. If you want to skip ahead I've put bold text to help you skip around. You can either keep reading now, or skip ahead to the bold text in parens below.

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Review: BLU Studio C 5.0-Inch Android Smartphone

  • June 27, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following is a review of the BLU Studio C 5.0-Inch Android Smartphone, received as part of the Amazon Vine program. Very decent entry-level phone First off, as I appear to be unable to use my existing SIM card from my provider with this phone I was unable to use it to make standard calls. However, I did use it for playing music, browsing the web, and Google Hangouts. That said, I was pretty impressed with the BLU Studio C immediately after opening the package as it included both a screen protector as well as clear back case cover.

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Configuring a libGDX project to run as a desktop application in Android Studio

  • March 13, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following will quickly cover how to setup a newly imported libGDX project to run a desktop application, via Android Studio 1.1.0. This assumes that you have already created a new libGDX project and have already imported it into Android Studio. If you have not, please review Creating your first libgdx project with Android Studio 1.1.0. With the project imported, select the configurations drop-down, or navigate to Run > Edit Configurations.

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Review: LibGDX Game Development Essentials (2014)

  • March 7, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following is a review of LibGDX Game Development Essentials, written by Juwal Bose, and released in December 2014 by Packt Publishing. Difficult to follow, but not a complete waste of time LibGDX Game Development Essentials is hard to follow along with, and since I'm one of those learners who likes to follow along when I'm learning a technology, that made this book troublesome. On the one hand, I certainly got something out of the book, and successfully got a glimpse of just how powerful LibGDX is.

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Creating your first libGDX project with Android Studio 1.1.0

  • February 28, 2015
  • James Skemp
This is a quick 'tutorial' on how to get started with libGDX with Android Studio 1.1.0. Unfortunately while libGDX can be used with Android Studio 1.x, documentation regarding it is sparse. I'll assume that you have Android Studio 1.1.0 (1.x generally) installed and properly running. If you haven't already, download libgdx from the official site. The file name should be gdx-setup.jar, and will be run whenever you need to create a new project.

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Enabling ADB on a Lenovo A7600-F TAB A10

  • November 6, 2014
  • James Skemp
As of this post, Lenovo does not have an ADB Interface Driver for their Lenovo A7600-F TAB A10. However, since I'd like to develop on it, I had to find a solution. An initial forum post pointed me to the older ADB Interface Driver for their ThinkPad Tablet. However, trying to update the android_winusb.inf with the necessary information was throwing a signature error when I tried to install it on Windows 8.

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