An image is worth a 1000 words. Source That image generally sums up the main beats of the Android Activity lifecycle. Knowing the lifecycle allows you to think about what your application should do as it goes through this lifecycle. What information you need to save to ensure the user has a consistent experience? I’d really like to see how Twitter handles the lifecycle on it’s timeline activity. I admire how well, even when the app crashes, it’s able to maintain the exact position I was in on my twitter feed.

Intents are a kind of messaging system used by Android activities to pass information back and forth. It helps keep a separation of concerns between activities. There are two main types of intents: explicit and implicit. Explicit intents are best used between activities within your own application, since they require the full class name in order for them to be started. Here’s an example of starting an explicit intent. This would appear in an Activity class:

As the owner of the Oculus Rift, it’s important I stay on top of the latest VR news now. Facebook had their Oculus Connect 4 event this week where they showed off some new hardware. As a current owner though, I’m most excited for Rift Core 2.0, a complete system overhaul of the Rift’s system software. I’m excited to try out the new apps that come with the 2.0 update, Oculus Dash and Oculus Home 2.

When the Oculus summer sale started, I immediately went and purchased one online. For that price, I just had to, it was too good to pass up on. The TL:DR is: best impulse purchase ever! One thing I didn’t have though was a PC to run VR. The PC I currently had was 8 years old, running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of DDR2 RAM and an ATI Radeon 4850.