Android Cookbook: Frequently Asked Questions

iFAQ - (in)Frequently Asked Questions

Question	Answer
Are there enough recipes yet? Are all the good recipes taken?	No. No. Please, keep 'em coming!
What is it?	The O'Reilly Android Cookbook is a crowd-sourced reference to all aspects of developing successful Android applications. It is not an application to manage your food recipes under Android!
Who is doing this?	This site was created after O'Reilly Media contracted with me to create an O'Reilly Android Cookbook. The contract author is Ian Darwin of RejmiNet Group Inc, author of the popular Java Cookbook. On the O'Reilly side, the book's editor is Meghan Blanchette; previously it was Courtney Nash; and before that, Mike Loukides was editor until other duties made him too busy to continue as editor of this book.
Who else?	The site is being written wiki-style, so anybody can sign up and contribute content. There are currently around 300 members in the Android Cookbook Community, of whom almost a hundred have contributed recipes to the book. But don't worry - there's room for you too!
Are the recipes copyright? Can I use the code?	Yes to both - all recipes are copyright by their originators, and are released freely under the Creative Commons CC-BY License. You can use the code for anything you like, as long as you credit the author and AndroidCookbook.com
Why Should I Contribute?	You get your name listed as a contributor to the site. If your recipe is used in the published Book, you will receive a copy of the Android Cookbook and be listed as a contributor in the book.
What if I think I can write a better version of a recipe that's already on the site? Or what if I (oops) just wrote a recipe on the same topic as somebody else's recipe?	In both cases, no problem! We have room for all the recipes you can send us. We might not include two recipes on the same topic in the published book edition, but both will remain online for your fellow Android developers to learn from. "May the best recipe on each topic win!"
Who is this "orphaned recipe" person? What if I want to "take over" an orphaned recipe?	In relational database terms, every recipe needs an owner (foreign key constraint). I created this pseudo-user to hold recipes that people start but don't finish - I figure after nine months it's safe to say that a person will not be getting around to finishing it. That's the length of the "school year" in many countries, among other things, If you'd like to adopt an orphaned recipe, just send me your ideas (or preferably a partly-finished recipe) by email; if I'm convinced, I will "chown" the recipe to you.
Can I license my contributions under the GPL? BSD? ASL?	All recipes must be covered by the Creative Commons CC-BY License so that we can include them in the printed book by O'Reilly Media. Since you are and remain the copyright holder of your own code, you always have the choice of making your code available under other license(s) as well, such as BSD, GPL, or whatever. You need only include a one-line comment to the effect that, e.g., `This code is dual-licensed under CC-BY and the BSD License` at the beginning of each code snippet.
How do I mark up my recipes?	We use a subset of standard Wiki Markup; see the Recipe Wiki Markup Subset for Cookbook Site.
Why does my new Recipe not appear?	New Recipes are checked by a Moderator to ensure they are plausible looking; once your Recipe has been Moderator-approved it will show up. If you don't logout but instead let your session time out, this will delay the approval; our moderators are trained not to edit recipes while their contributor is still signed in, to prevent those annoying little editing conflicts! If the Recipe just consists of a problem, a solution, and a one-line discussion, we will likely consider it too incomplete to approve.
How do I add screenshots?	After you have initially saved your recipe and go to Edit it, then a Screenshot upload dialog will be part of the edit page.
Why are Recipes and even Comments Moderated?	General paranoia. To avoid SPAM, xCSS and other evils of the modern age.
Why does saving sometimes not work?	When editing an existing recipe, please be sure to always fill in the "Summary of changes" field near the bottom of the Edit page. Forgetting this is the most common cause of errors, since the error message comes out where that field is, at the bottom of the page. Watch for the "Successfully Edited" (or "Successfully Created") message at the top of the Recipe view page, which you'll usually be sent back to after editing a recipe.
What do I do while waiting for the moderator to approve my recipe?	You can still edit the recipe. If you lose track of the URL for it, just go to your Preferences page; there's a list of Recipes near the bottom of the page (recipes show up here even if not moderated yet). You can start in on another recipe - the more the merrier!
Why do I have to give my real name and mailing address?	You are contributing to a published work, and we want to acknowledge you; there is a tradition dating back many generations of attributing contributors by their real names. If you contribute a recipe that is used in the printed edition, we will need your address in order to send a copy of the book to you. There may be other goodies that we'll want to mail out. We promise never to send junk mail to your mailing address! We need it for legal reasons / regulatory compliance anyway.
What is Moderator Approval vs Editorial Approval?	Moderator Approval means that a Recipe, Comment or other item can be shown to other people. Moderators are supposed to screen for SPAM, CSS, and other malignancies. Editorial Approval means that the Recipe will be included in the published edition of the Cookbook. The section Newest recipes (on the home page) shows the most recently-added recipes after they are given moderator approval. There is not yet a list of Editorial-Approved recipes, but each recipe's details page shows near the bottom whether it has been chosen yet for inclusion in the book.
Why do you not display my URL in comments?	Sites used to do this, but way too many link-spammers simply abuse this. Look at this "technical" page about Android and see how many commenters even read the post before posting their spam-troll "backlinks"
How many recipes are there? How many do you need?	The current count of recipes submitted and approved is shown on the home page. To make the printed book we probably need around 300 recipes. See this list of suggested recipes. For the online version of this site, we have a really big hard disk and can hold as many legitimate recipes as people can send us.
What web site technology is used?	The web site was designed and implemented by Ian Darwin using JBoss Seam 2.1. The data are stored in the industrial-strength PostgreSQL database. The server is running OpenBSD 4.8 on a machine in a colo server farm "someplace on the 'net".
What if I think you have my copyright materials on display?	Remember that a lot of things in Android code are pretty obvious - there is only one way to write certain things. If you believe that somebody really has taken your copyright material and displayed it on our site, please submit a complete and correctly formatted DMCA takedown notice for the offending article.
Are these questions really Frequently Asked?	Of course not. Nobody does that. Well, some of them have been asked. An FAQ is now a way of providing information that you think people might ask, or to answer questions that you wish somebody would ask.