What am I doing wrong

Hey Joe, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Can you show me what the finished code should look like? This is the error I'm running into "Make sure you use the 'Log.e()' method to log the message from the instructions!"

Thanks :)

Ah, sorry! I forgot to ask which step of the challenge you were on. Based on your reply, it looks like you are task 3 of the challenge.

In task 2 however, the challenge asks you to pass the mSignUpCallback callback that was initialized at the top into the newUser's signUpInBackground function. In your version of the code you are passing a brand new SignUpCallback instead of using the one at the top. This appears to still work for task 2, but will cause problems on task 3 due to how we check the challenge for validity.

If you pass the mSignUpCallback to the function and do your error checking and Log.e(TAG, "ERROR"); inside of that callback, it should then work.

As a side note, Android's Log.e() function has another variant that allows you to pass the exception as the third argument. I noticed that this version will not work with this code challenge and will say there was a compiler error. That's due to how we are testing for this particular challenge, so just use the Log.e(TAG, "ERROR");, 2 argument version of the function for this challenge like you are already doing.

See also this related post for an example of what I described above.

mSignUpCallback is an instance variable that's already defined there at the top of the file. You wouldn't want to instantiate like you would a class.

So in other words, you had:

newUser.signUpInBackground(new SignUpCallback() {
 // your done function
});

or in the case of this latest comment...

newUser.signUpInBackground(new mSignUpCallback() {
 // your done function
});

And you'll want to change that to

newUser.signUpInBackground(mSignUpCallback);

So like this?

import android.app.Activity;
import android.util.Log;
import com.parse.ParseUser;
import com.parse.ParseException;
import com.parse.SignUpCallback;

public class SignUpActivity extends Activity {

    public static final String TAG = SignUpActivity.class.getSimpleName();

    protected SignUpCallback mSignUpCallback = new SignUpCallback() {
        @Override
        public void done(ParseException e) {

        }
    };

    // onCreate() and other code has been omitted

    protected void signUp(String username, String password) {
      ParseUser newUser = new ParseUser();
      newUser.setUsername(username);
                newUser.setPassword(password);
      newUser.signUpInBackground(new SignUpCallback);
    @Override
                    public void done(ParseException e) {
                        if (e == null) {
                        }
          else {
          Log.e(TAG, "ERROR");
          }
        }
  });
}

Joe has done a great job explaining the problem and solution. You don't need to use this code:

newUser.signUpInBackground(new SignUpCallback);
    @Override
                    public void done(ParseException e) {
                        if (e == null) {
                        }
          else {
          Log.e(TAG, "ERROR");
          }
        }

That's recreating the SignUpCallback that's already defined as mSignUpCallback above. This code challenge is teaching you how to pass in callback methods as parameters instead of declaring new callbacks each time. So get rid of that code, then instead pass it as a parameter like Joe shows:

newUser.signUpInBackground(mSignUpCallback);