Eclipse-ception

Guys!! Eclipse just went all Inception on me!

Adding a float value to your resources

Earlier today, I was trying to figure out how to add a float value to constants file. What I used to do was add a string value in my strings.xml, retrieve the string value, and convert it to float.

float floatFromFile = Float.valueOf(getResources().getString(R.string.my_float));

I was trying out something new but it wasn't working, so I decided to look for a more accepted solution. Google led me to this StackOverflow question. I was on the right track after all! I think the accepted answer is incomplete, or not clear enough for my purposes. I ended up having this entry in my dimensions.xml file:

<item name="face_feature_marker_size" type="vals" format="float">2.0</item>

And then in my code, I retrieve the value as:

TypedValue tempVal = new TypedValue();
getResources().getValue(R.vals.face_feature_marker_size, tempVal, true);
float markerSize = testVal.getFloat();

I ended up having more lines of code with no idea if this is more optimized. Let me know what you think!

Quick Tip: git cloning

A user-friendly way of cloning a git repo is through the eGit plug-in in Eclipse. But sometimes, especially on Windows machines, Eclipse has trouble cleaning up after itself after completing a clone operation. The best workaround for this is to clone the repo from git bash and then import the repo in Eclipse.

default@ZDOMINGUEZ-T420 ~
$ git clone git@github.com:<your git repo> <local folder to check out to>

When git finishes cloning your repo, import it to Eclipse.

Browse to the folder you checked out to, click OK, and the newly-cloned repo should now appear on the Git Repositories view.