Category Archives: Uncategorized

Decompile, Edit, and Recompile Android Apps with APK Studio

If you have ever tried to modify precompiled android application, then you might be familiar with APKTool. APKTool is one of the most commonly used application to decompile and recompile android apk.

But there is a drawback with this APKTool. You can only decompile or recompile your apk, but you cannot edit the content, more specifically the source code. Generally the whole source code is compiled in .smali files and to edit that files you have to rely on some other compiler, decompiler and editor like Notepad++.

To combine all this things together and to make development easy, an XDA user, Vaibhav, created APK Studio.

APK Studio
APK Studio

As the name suggest, the APK Studio allows you to decompile, edit and recompile apk files right from one single app. This IDE looks quite similar to Netbeans IDE and has a lot of features to explore.

You can download this IDE from codeplex or XDA.

(Image credit: XDA)

Understanding Directory Structure of Symfony 2

Symfony 2 is a PHP framework. When you download it, if noticed, Symfony 2 has a directory structure. By default there are 5 directories like app, bin, src,vendor, web. If you had developed any kind of application with Symfony 2 then you might have followed something like put your source code in src, put all static assets in web, write config files in app etc. Again this directory structure is configurable, that means you can customize it according to your project needs. Even though the directory names are self-explanatory, let’s have a deeper look of this structure.

By default Symfony consists of following directories,

  • app/: The application configuration
  • src/: The project’s PHP code
  • vendor/: The third-party dependencies
  • web/: The web root directory

app/

‘app’ directory in Symfony 2 holds the application configuration. You can find all configuration related stuff in ‘app/config’ folder. If you need to configure your database or Swiftmailer then you will need to change parameters/settings from here. Apart from that this directory holds the ‘cache’. While writing code in Symfony 2 you will be working with lots of files ranging from xml, yml to php, twig, html etc. Controllers will be written in some file, routes will be defined in some another files, views will be written in some other file and so on. So while serving request Symfony has to read all these necessary files. Since the count of files is too high, to achieve great performance Symfony 2 has inbuilt caching. And this cached data will be stored in ‘cache’ directory. Again there is a ‘log’ directory which has debugging related data, especially useful in development.

Continue reading Understanding Directory Structure of Symfony 2

Getting Started With Symfony 2: Quick Setup

If you are a web developer then you might have heard something called as “Symfony“. So what is this Symfony? Framework? Language? Tool? or something else? Let’s have a quick look on this.

What is Symfony?

Symfony is nothing but a set of reusable PHP components, a web application framework. Symfony is a leading PHP framework, which has a large user base and used to create websites and web applications.

Symfony is basically set of components. Depending on your needs, you can either choose individual component, you can choose set of components or you can go with full framework. Before going to Why Symfony? Let’s first see why you should use a Framework?

Continue reading Getting Started With Symfony 2: Quick Setup

Using CSS Variables

Nice to hear! Variables are finally available in CSS. You can declare variables in CSS with var-* prefix, such as

html{
    var-pri-color: #0090f0;
} 

With above code, we created a variable with name ‘pri-color‘ and it stores ‘#0090f0‘ as value. There is an important condition with CSS variables and that is, you must declare them under CSS-Selectors else they will not work. Since we want to use the variable globally, we nested it under html{} selector.

You can use this variable with var() method as shown in following code

body {  
    background-color: var(pri-color);  
} 

Hence the whole code will be

html{
    var-pri-color: #0090f0;
}
body{
    background-color: var(pri-color);
}

Demo
(You will see blue background in following demo, if your browser supports CSS variables). Click here to load demo on new page.

See the Pen CSS Variables by Ankur (@asmhatre) on CodePen.

How to View your Old Notifications in Android

Lost or dismissed your important notification from your android device? Now you want to get it back?  Well if you are having Android JellyBean or later, you can get back your dismissed notification with few easy steps.

Android Notification History
Android Notification History

Simple go to your android home screen and tap App icon. Switch to Widgets tab, and look for 1×1 Settings Shortcut. Place it on your home screen. Now tap on that newly placed icon and select Notifications from list. That’s all. Tap on it to see all pushed notification history in reverse chronological order.

Image via ibtimes.com and Kārlis Dambrāns

WordPress Hack: Remove Width And Height Attributes From Images

Whenever you upload any image to your WordPress based website, and you use it in your post, automatically WordPress adds Width and Height attributes to all image elements (i.e. in tags).

This is fine in most of the cases, but if you want to stop WordPress from adding those attributes then you can go with this code.
Continue reading WordPress Hack: Remove Width And Height Attributes From Images