DON'T hide pointers

I have seen alot of code where typedefs are used to create pointer types like:

typedef unsigned char *Message;

Some people might think that this is a very good thing to do or that it serves some (obscure) purpose but in my opinion such typedefs are plain wrong and evil. They cause alot of errors. Why would a sane person want to hide the fact that a variable of type Message is actually a pointer? It serves no pupose, is usually longer to type and creates disparity between declaration and use of a variable which makes code harder to understand for a new commer and a nightmare to maintain.

Android: Display a Title on a Location Marker (an OverlayItem) in Android MapView

I recently needed to display a title over a location marker in Android MapView. I was realy surprised to find out that there is no direct functionality available for doing this. Although the second argument in OverlayItem's constructor is Title and one would think that there must be some way to display this text as title over the marker but strangely there isnt. Anyway, if you are trying to do the same thing and wondering how to do this, here is an Overlay class which will do this for you. It will display the title text over the marker in MapView:

package com.labs;

import java.util.ArrayList;

import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.graphics.Point;
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.graphics.RectF;
import android.graphics.drawable.BitmapDrawable;
import android.graphics.drawable.Drawable;
import android.text.TextPaint;

import com.google.android.maps.GeoPoint;
import com.google.android.maps.ItemizedOverlay;
import com.google.android.maps.MapView;
import com.google.android.maps.OverlayItem;

public class ResoucesOverlay extends ItemizedOverlay
{

    public ResoucesOverlay(Drawable defaultMarker)
    {
        /*Calling boundCenterBottom() on defaultMarker makes the marker image connect
          at its Bottom center to the latitude and longitude of this Overlay Item*/
        super(boundCenterBottom(defaultMarker));

        markerHeight = ((BitmapDrawable) defaultMarker).getBitmap().getHeight();

        /* This call to populate is important. Although this does not appear in the MapView tutorial
         * on Google's Android developer site, the mapview some times crashes without this call.
         */
        populate();
    }

    @Override
    protected OverlayItem createItem(int i)
    {
        return mOverlays.get(i);
    }

    @Override
    public int size()
    {
        return mOverlays.size();
    }

    @Override
    public void draw(android.graphics.Canvas canvas, MapView mapView,
            boolean shadow)
    {
        super.draw(canvas, mapView, shadow);

        // go through all OverlayItems and draw title for each of them
        for (OverlayItem item:mOverlays)
        {
            /* Converts latitude & longitude of this overlay item to coordinates on screen.
             * As we have called boundCenterBottom() in constructor, so these coordinates
             * will be of the bottom center position of the displayed marker.
             */
            GeoPoint point = item.getPoint();
            Point markerBottomCenterCoords = new Point();
            mapView.getProjection().toPixels(point, markerBottomCenterCoords);

            /* Find the width and height of the title*/
            TextPaint paintText = new TextPaint();
            Paint paintRect = new Paint();

            Rect rect = new Rect();
            paintText.setTextSize(FONT_SIZE);
            paintText.getTextBounds(item.getTitle(), 0, item.getTitle().length(), rect);

            rect.inset(-TITLE_MARGIN, -TITLE_MARGIN);
            rect.offsetTo(markerBottomCenterCoords.x - rect.width()/2, markerBottomCenterCoords.y - markerHeight - rect.height());

            paintText.setTextAlign(Paint.Align.CENTER);
            paintText.setTextSize(FONT_SIZE);
            paintText.setARGB(255, 255, 255, 255);
            paintRect.setARGB(130, 0, 0, 0);

            canvas.drawRoundRect( new RectF(rect), 2, 2, paintRect);
            canvas.drawText(item.getTitle(), rect.left + rect.width() / 2,
                    rect.bottom - TITLE_MARGIN, paintText);
        }
    }

    public void addOverlay(int latitude, int longitude, String title,
            String snippet)
    {
        OverlayItem item;

        GeoPoint geopoint = new GeoPoint(latitude, longitude);
        item = new OverlayItem(geopoint, title, snippet);
        mOverlays.add(item);
        populate();

    }

    public void addOverlay(OverlayItem overlayItem)
    {
        mOverlays.add(overlayItem);
        populate();
    }

    private int markerHeight;
    private ArrayList<OverlayItem> mOverlays = new ArrayList<OverlayItem>();

    private static final int FONT_SIZE = 12;
    private static final int TITLE_MARGIN = 3;
}

The result will look like following: