android Android Emulator Keyboard Support in ADT 20+ If you've upgraded to ADT 20, you may have noticed that your keyboard no longer works on inputs on your emulator. That is, when you have an EditText on the screen, typing characters into your physical keyboard doesn't register anything in the emulator; you need to
android Fragment Transactions Reference I recently found myself looking at Fragment transactions and wondering precisely what each Fragment state meant. I vaguely had an idea of what added, attached, shown, hidden, detached and removed meant, but not the specific behaviors of each. I spent a morning looking through Android's code to better
android Obscure SimpleDateFormat Android Issue This bug should win an award for the most obscure bug I've ever run into this year. Check out this code below: Calendar cal1 = new GregorianCalendar(2012, 5, 11); cal1.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC")); Calendar cal2 = new GregorianCalendar(2012, 5, 12); cal2.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("
android Custom Fragment animations are different between the support library and vanilla I've been converting a lot of my apps to the support library [http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html] recently and ran into one issue worth mentioning. To be clear: I'm converting apps that use android.app.Fragment [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.
android Unicode Normalization and Android I ran into a Unicode rendering issue recently that I wanted to go over. Check out this screenshot from an application we've recently localized into Vietnamese: Notice how a lot of the text looks cut off (especially those blue labels). What's going on? It turns out
android Yet Another Dumb Widget Hiding Trick I didn't mean to be writing a series [blog.danlew.net/2011/06/30/honeycomb_app_widget_and_backwards_compatibility/] of these articles [blog.danlew.net/2012/01/26/another_app_widget_compatibility_trick/], but I keep getting backed into a corner... The last two times, I was
android Solving Initial Compilation Issues with Android Two weeks ago I helped with a beginner's Android Workshop at Mobile March [http://mobilemarchtc.com/]. A lot of the people had problems getting their development environment up and running - but for reasons that weren't really any fault of their own, or were easily overlooked.
android Upcoming Talks: AnDevCon III and Mobile March 3D I'm going to be speaking at AnDevCon III! My talk is called "Don't Make Me Repeat Myself: Tips and Tricks to Avoid Code Duplication and Increase Code Reuse on Android". You can find a long description of it here [http://www.andevcon.com/AnDevCon_
android Another App Widget Compatibility Trick I've written previously on the issue of preventing app widgets from appearing on particular versions of Android [blog.danlew.net/2011/06/30/honeycomb_app_widget_and_backwards_compatibility/]. This is useful, for example, when you have a Honeycomb-style widget but support pre-Honeycomb devices. I've got
android GridLayout Child View Clipping Issues After back-porting GridLayout to 1.5+ [https://github.com/dlew/android-gridlayout], I finally feel comfortable using it in my apps. There's a bit of an initial learning curve, but I think that is mostly a function of un-learning the LinearLayout/RelativeLayout state of mind. I've converted
android Highlights from Android's New Design Docs I've just finished reading through the wonderful new Android Design site [http://developer.android.com/design/] Google just released. A lot of the information is stuff you should already know if you're an Android developer. However, I took notes of pages/information that I found particularly
android GridLayout Library for Android 1.5+ Support If you're like me, when you first heard about GridLayout [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/GridLayout.html], you were excited. Then disappointed, because it's currently only available for Ice Cream Sandwich. That is true no longer - I've taken the time to
android Sharing with Gmail I read through the Android Training docs [http://developer.android.com/training/index.html] recently and came across a section [http://developer.android.com/training/sharing/send.html#send-binary-content] which I thought I could use to improve sharing on Rage Faces [https://github.com/dlew/android-ragefaces] (by getting rid of
android TextWatchers and onRestoreInstanceState() There's a small timing issue I'd like to mention because it's bitten me a few times now. When you want to observe changes to an EditText [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/EditText.html], you add a TextWatcher [http://developer.android.com/reference/
android Android Drawable XML Talk I recently gave a talk on the basics of Android drawable resources (via XML). There's a recording I made of the talk - not super, but functional. I had to split it into two parts because of time restrictions on YouTube. Here's part one [http://www.
android Logc.at A few developers and I have formed a new Android development blog. We snagged what I think is an awesome and nerdy url: logc.at [http://logc.at]. I will still be writing here - this blog is intended for one-off coding issues that I want to document. The new
android New to Android: More Style Restrictions There have been two changes the Android platform build tools which have caught me off guard. You may run into these problems when you next update your aapt. Both of them cause compilation errors, so they're not easy to ignore, but it's not immediately obvious how
android Honeycomb App Widget and Backwards Compatibility Honeycomb added some neat functionality [http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html#collections] to Android widgets. However, there's a problem that arises from adding a widget using collections to your app - what if your APK is supposed to work on all versions of Android? How
passwords Passwords: Longer, Not More Complex I was going through a mandatory security training course for my company when I came across a slide about passwords. Its advice was that the password should be at least 7 characters long and include a good mixture of lower/upper case characters, plus numbers and special symbols. Sony is
android Using Subquery Columns on Android with SQLite Take a look at this (contrived) query, as might be passed to [ SQLiteDatabase.rawQuery()]( http://developer.android.com/reference/android/database/sqlite/SQLiteDatabase.html#rawQuery (java.lang.String, java.lang.String[])): SELECT * FROM t1 A, (SELECT T2.id FROM t2 T2) B WHERE A.id = B.id On Android 2.
android Detecting the Keystore Signature in Code Here's a problem I'm sure many of us have faced: you've got code that runs one way when you're developing and another way when you're releasing. A few examples I've run into: * Logging during development, but disabled for
android HTML in TextViews There's a trick I've been increasingly using as I've learned how powerful it is: HTML in TextViews. I used to think that TextViews were pretty plain; they contained a CharSequence, and that was it. But it can actually contain a Spanned [http://developer.android.
android Image Sharing on Android One of the sillier projects I've worked on in my spare time is Rage Faces for Android [https://market.android.com/details?id=com.idunnolol.ragefaces]. It has almost no value to anyone, which is why it's free (in every sense of the word [https://github.
android Tiled bitmaps in layer drawables This is a bizarre bug that a coworker came across. There's a cool feature of XML drawables that allows you to tile bitmaps, using android:tileMode [http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/topics/resources/drawable-resource.html#Bitmap] . There is also the ability to layer drawables in XML,
android Custom styles in Android libraries About nine months ago, Android added library support [http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/developing/projects/projects-eclipse.html#ReferencingLibraryProject] . It allows you to define multiple Android projects where (at build time) it combines them all into one. These libraries have proven very useful in my work because there'
