My Neck Is Killing Me...

So I’ll be brief and to the point. For the sake of my memoirs, I’ll again list 5 things I’ve learned this week:

• NetBeans is a tremendously helpful IDE when compared to ADT (previously). The Android support isn’t fancy or trendy, but it’s rock solid. More importantly, it doesn’t respond like a doped out cow and doesn’t crash if you look at it funny.
• When passing information between Android services and activities, don’t mix PendingIntents and regular ones without checking how you’re handling their extras (i.e., they’ll get clobbered when new intents arrive). Using the AlarmManager and the apparently usual Matrioska-like arrangement of listeners, services and AsyncTasks to run stuff in the background is, well… interesting¹ to say the least, but it works fine.
• WebViews bleed RAM like a sieve that’s been shot ten times with a wide bore cannon by Chuck Norris. So just use an invisible activity to set up a sticky service and then have that fire up your webview. Again. And again. And when it crashes. And when it doesn’t crash, consider shooting it occasionally to put it out of its misery.
• Tumult’s Hype is the best web authoring tool, ever. Go out and buy it now, before someone figures this out and buys the entire company to make a worse product or stick it in limbo.
• I need to take my home office back and find a way to stuff in a bigger desk, or get a TV hung on the wall for “emergencies”. That and stock up on muscle relaxants.

That said, I’m going to go back to doing the kind of JavaScript that would horrify purists if I ever considered releasing it publicly²…