android

A collection of 137 posts

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

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'

android

Sending Emails on Android, Take 2

A while back, I wrote a post about how to send specifically send only emails on Android [blog.danlew.net/2010/08/19/sending_emails_on_android/]. Unfortunately, the solution I posted does not work 100% of the time. My previous solution was a hack and (as hacks are wont

android

Drop shadow text

Here's a little tip for creating a decent drop shadow effect in a TextView. The issue I ran into initially when trying the shadow effects on TextView is that I could rarely get it to look right - instead of a clean, single pixel shadow, it'd

android

The True Problem With Google's License Verification Library (LVL)

Google recently introduced a new method to fight piracy on the Android Market, the License Verification Library (LVL). It replaces the old system copy protection system, wherein your APKs would be put in a folder that you can't access. Unless you root. Oh, and anyone who can copy

android

Sending Emails on Android

UPDATE 2/25/2011: There is a much better solution to the problem I have now posted [https://blog.danlew.net/2011/02/25/sending_emails_on_android_take_2/]. In this post I outline how to share information solely via email. There's some background information up front;

android

The Curious Case of the Missing HttpsURLConnection

I ran into an Android OS bug recently that is pretty harsh related to HTTPS connections. Basically, what happens is this: 1. You want to setup a connection between the phone and a server, and you need to control both the input and the output. As a result, you use