This Fall Lookout mobile discovered that developers were writing some pretting interesting things to LogCat and the talked about their findings at DefCon.

While, as a dev, you should try to never put sensitive information in your logs, you can use this system to turn off logging in your releases.

At the beginning of each of my classes i write:

public class MyClass
{
    // Debugging
    private static final String TAG = "MyClass";
    private static final boolean GLOBAL_DEBUG = DebugMode.MODE;
    private static final boolean LOCAL_DEBUG = true;
    private static final boolean D = ( GLOBAL_DEBUG && LOCAL_DEBUG );

Notice the DebugMode.MODE is a separate class, and it’s a pretty simple one:

public class DebugMode
{
    public static final boolean MODE = true;
}

Anyways, then, when I want to put something in LogCat I write

if (D) Log.d ( TAG, "something interesting happened");

Finally, when I’m ready to release, I only have to change the DebugMode class to:

public class DebugMode
{
    public static final boolean MODE = false;
}

And voila! We now have both fine-grained, per-class control of how much info gets sent to LogCat, as well as a Global on/off switch that will help keep prying eyes out of our logs.

Anyways, hope that helps

filed under: Android, Interesting stuff, Scripts, Security | comments (0) | read more...

Sometimes I’m shocked at the number of RSS readers pulling data from this site (according to the urchin stats) when I havent posted in a year or more.  But there’s a good reason for that — well for me not posting anyways:  I’ve begun learning Android and have created my first app Listables.

You can read more about Listables here: http://alostpacket.com/

In the future I hope to keep this site more updated and include both actionscript and Java in my posts.  As well as some Flex , PHP, SQLite and more.

filed under: Android, Misc | comments (0) | read more...