Android Developer

Designing a Prompt Dialog OpenGL 3D

Fri, 18 May 2012 21:35:26 GMT

Now that you've successfully created a simple alert dialog, let's tackle an alert dialog that's a little more complex the prompt dialog. Another JavaScript staple, the prompt dialog shows the user a hint or question and asks for input via an edit box. The prompt dialog returns that string to the program so it can continue. This will be a good example to study because it features a number of facilities provided by the Builder class and also allows us to examine the synchronous, asynchronous,...

Introduction to Audio on Android AndroidMedia

Fri, 18 May 2012 21:14:12 GMT

Any smartphone worth its name these days has audio playback capabilities on par with dedicated portable media devices or MP3 players. Of course, Android-based devices are no different. These capabilities allow for the building of music player, audio book, podcast, or just about any other type of application that is centered around audio playback. In this chapter, we'll explore what Android's capabilities are in terms of format and codec support, and we'll build a few different playback...

LISTING 815 Pinning a View to a geographical location ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 18 May 2012 20:20:25 GMT

Double lat 37.422134 1E6 Double lng -122.084069 1E6 GeoPoint geoPoint new GeoPoint lat.intValue , lng.intValue geoLP new MapView.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, geoPoint, EditText editText2 new EditText getApplicationContext editText2.setText Location Pinned Panning the map will leave the first Textview stationary in the upper left corner, while the second Textview will move to remain pinned to a particular position on the map. To remove a View from a Map View, call removeView, passing in the View...

Authenticating with Web Services Login and Logoff CrossPlatform

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:22:48 GMT

If your back-end application requires authentication in order to perform web service queries, you will need to add a login method to your source adapter. The login method shown in Listing 7-3 is taken from the source adapter for the SugarCRM source adapter you can find the full implementation in RhoSync vendor sync SugarCRM. Listing 7-3. Login method with back-end authentication ua 'user_name' gt u password' gt pwd ss client.login ua,nil this is a WSDL if ss.error.number.to_i 0 puts 'failed to...

Mapping Where Am I ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:47:57 GMT

In the following code example the Where Am I project is extended again. This time you'll add mapping functionality by transforming it into a Map Activity. As the device location changes, the map will automatically re-center on the new position. 1. Start by adding the lt uses-permission gt tag for Internet access to the application manifest. Also import the Android maps library within the application tag. lt xml version 1.0 encoding utf-8 gt lt uses-library lt action gt lt category gt lt...

Runtime Configuration Changes ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:05:32 GMT

Android handles runtime changes to the language, location, and hardware by terminating and restarting each application and reloading the resource values. This default behavior isn't always convenient or desirable, particularly as some configuration changes like those to screen orientation and keyboard availability can occur as easily as a user can rotate the device or slide out the keyboard. You can customize your application's response to such changes by detecting and reacting to them...

How Lighting Works Android Games 2

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:02:39 GMT

Let's think about how lighting works for a moment. The first thing we need is a light source, to emit light. We also need an object that can be lit. Finally we need a sensor, like our eyes or a camera, which will catch the photons that are sent out by the light source and reflected back by the object. Lighting changes the perceived color of an object depending on the following The light source's color or intensity The light source's position and direction relative to the lit object The object's...

Light Sources Android Games 2

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:20:31 GMT

We are surrounded by all kind of light sources. The sun constantly throws photons at us. Our monitors emit light, surrounding us with that nice blue glow at night. Light bulbs and headlights keep us from bumping or driving into things in the dark. OpenGL ES allows you to create four types of light sources Ambient light Ambient light is not a light source per se but rather the result of photons coming from other light sources bouncing around in our world. All these stray photons combined make...

Extending the Enum Class AndroidJava

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:26:12 GMT

Enum's generic type is Enum lt E extends Enum lt E gt gt . Although the formal type parameter list looks ghastly, it is not that hard to understand. But first, take a look at Listing 5-42. Listing 5-42. The Coin class as it appears from the perspective of its classfile public final class Coin extends Enum lt Coin gt public static final Coin PENNY new Coin PENNY, 0 public static final Coin NICKEL new Coin NICKEL, 1 public static final Coin DIME new Coin DIME, 2 public static final Coin OUARTER...

Introducing the SQLiteOpenHelper ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:32:55 GMT

SQLiteOpenHelper is an abstract class used to implement the best practice pattern for creating, opening, and upgrading databases. By implementing an SQLite Open Helper you hide the logic used to decide if a database needs to be created or upgraded before it's opened. Listing 7-1 showed how to extend the SQLiteOpenHelper class by overriding the constructor, onCreate, and onUpgrade methods to handle the creation of a new database and upgrading to a new version, respectively. In the previous...

List Controls OpenGL 3D

Fri, 18 May 2012 09:13:34 GMT

The Android SDK offers several list controls. Figure 4-6 shows a ListView control that we'll discuss in this section. The ListView control displays a list of items vertically. You generally use a ListView by writing a new activity that extends android.app.ListActivity. ListActivity contains a ListView, and you set the data for the ListView by calling the setListAdapter method. Listing 4-17 demonstrates this. Figure 4-6. Using the ListView control Figure 4-6. Using the ListView control Listing...

Receiving and Broadcasting Intents AndroidEmulator

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:45:40 GMT

Intents serve yet another purpose.You can broadcast an Intent object via a call to broadcastlntent to the Android system, and any application interested can receive that broadcast called a BroadcastReceiver .Your application might do both sending of and listening for Intent objects.These types of Intent objects are generally used to inform the greater system that something interesting has happened and use special Intent Action types. For example, the Intent action action_battery_low broadcasts...

Integer Long Short and Byte AndroidJava

Fri, 18 May 2012 05:52:58 GMT

Integer, Long, Short, and Byte store 32-bit, 64-bit, 16-bit, and 8-bit integer values in Integer, Long, Short, and Byte objects, respectively. Each class declares MAX_VALUE and MIN_VALUE constants that identify the maximum and minimum values that can be represented by its associated primitive type. These classes also declare the following constructors for initializing their objects Integer int value initializes the Integer object to value. Integer String s converts s's text to a 32-bit integer...

Working with messaging SMS AndroidPlatform

Fri, 18 May 2012 04:29:43 GMT

SMS is a hugely popular and important means of communication for mobile devices. SMS is used to send simple text messages and small amounts of data. Android includes a built-in SMS application that allows users to view received SMS messages and send messages including replying to received messages . Along with the built-in user-facing support and the related ContentProvider for interacting with the built-in system, the SDK provides APIs for developers to be able to send and receive messages...

Daytime Server application AndroidPlatform

Fri, 18 May 2012 03:47:15 GMT

Our Daytime Server application has a very basic function. The application listens on a TCP port for incoming socket connections. When a connection is made, the application writes a short textual string representation of the date and time via the socket, closes the socket, and then returns to listening for a new connection. In addition to the TCP socket interactions, our application logs requests to a SQLite database. Why Because we can The purpose of this application is to demonstrate...

Logcat Android Google Sdk

Fri, 18 May 2012 02:24:20 GMT

Granted, the errors we debugged in the last section were pretty straightforward no different from debugging in any other environment. But most applications are not as simple as DebugTest, and many problems are much harder to isolate and solve. Android provides a general-purpose logging facility that can help with many of those more difficult problems. As mentioned before, there's a logcat pane on the Debug perspective it's also in the DDMS perspective, which we'll talk about in the next section...

Android Hierarchy Viewer AndroidEmulator

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:53:57 GMT

The Android Hierarchy Viewer see Figure 2.8 , a visual tool that illustrates layout component relationships, helps developers design and debug user interfaces. Developers can use this tool to inspect the View properties and develop pixel-perfect layouts. For more information about user interface design and the Hierarchy Viewer, see Chapter 8,Designing User Interfaces with Layouts. Figure 2.8 Screenshot of the Android Hierarchy Viewer in action. Figure 2.8 Screenshot of the Android Hierarchy...

TabHost Android Google Sdk

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:20:28 GMT

Most modern Uls provide an interface element that lets the user flip through many pages of information quickly using tabs, with each screen of information available when its tab is pressed. Android's option is the TabHost View. Figures 11-7 through 11-10 show how it operates. Android enables the developer to choose between three different approaches for setting the tab's content. The developer can Set the content of a tab to an Intent. Figures 11-7 and 11-9 use this method. Use a...

Specifying the Target SDK Version AndroidEmulator

Thu, 17 May 2012 19:23:34 GMT

You should always specify the targetSdkVersion attribute for your application.This value represents the Android SDK version your application was built for and tested against. For example, if your application was built using the APIs that are backward-compatible to Android 1.6 API Level 4 , but targeted and tested using Android 2.2 SDK API Level 8 , then you would want to specify the targetSdkVersion attribute as 8.Therefore, add the following to your Android manifest file within the lt manifest...

Perspective Projection The Closer the Bigger Android Games 2

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:14:23 GMT

Until now we have always used an orthographic projection, meaning that no matter how far an object is from the near clipping plane, it will always have the same size on the screen. Our eyes show us a different picture of the world. The further away an object is, the smaller it appears to us. This is called perspective projection, and we've already talked about it a little in Chapter 4. The difference between an orthographic projection and a perspective projection can be explained by the shape...

Mobile Package Tracker Best Android Apps

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:42:36 GMT

This is a good alternative for tracking shipped packages. You can set up notifications to alert you of status changes in your package's journey. This app allows you to perform three simple actions tracking your package, getting a list of all your packages, and getting information on each shipment. You can enable notifications, set the types of alerts and frequency of updates, track the status level out for delivery or all changes in status , and more. THE TRACKER Tracking packages is pretty...

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Thu, 17 May 2012 14:46:33 GMT

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Grasping events AndroidPlatform

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:02:20 GMT

Events are used for changing the focus and for many other actions as well. We have already implemented several onClickListener methods for buttons in listing 3.2. Those OnClickListener instances were connected to button presses. The events they were indicating were Hey, somebody pressed me. This is exactly the same process that focus events go through when announcing or responding to OnFocus-Change events. Events have two halves the component raising the event and the component or components...

More Primitives Points Lines Strips and Fans Android Games 2

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:01:59 GMT

When I told you that OpenGL ES was a big, nasty triangle-rendering machine, I was not being 100 percent honest. In fact, OpenGL ES can also render points and lines. Best of all these are also defined via vertices, and thus all of the above also applies to them texturing, per-vertex colors, etc. . All we need to do to render these primitives is use something other than GL10.GL_TRIANGLES when we call glDrawArrays glDrawElements . We can also perform indexed rendering with these primitives,...

Resource Bundles AndroidJava

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:10:47 GMT

An internationalized application contains no hard-coded text or other locale-specific elements such as a specific currency format . Instead, each supported locale's version of these elements is stored outside of the application. NOTE Creating a set of locale-specific elements is known as localization. Java is responsible for storing each locale's version of certain elements, such as currency formats. In contrast, it is your responsibility to store each supported locale's version of other...

Info Kpb AndroidSDK

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:59:56 GMT

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NinePatchDrawable AndroidSystem

Thu, 17 May 2012 05:40:37 GMT

A NinePatchDrawable graphic is a stretchable bitmap image, which Android will automatically resize to accomodate the contents of the View in which you have placed it as the background. An example use of a NinePatch is the backgrounds used by standard Android buttons buttons must stretch to accommodate strings of various lengths. A NinePatch drawable is a standard PNG image that includes an extra 1-pixel-wide border. It must be saved with the extension .9.png, and saved into the res drawable...

Exercises Eio Application Development 2

Thu, 17 May 2012 03:35:02 GMT

1. Add a new color resource with a value of 00ff00 to your Droidl project. Within the layout file, change the textColor attribute of the TextView control to the color resource you just created. Rerun the application and view the result. 2. Add a new dimension resource with a value of 22pt to your Droidl project. Within the layout file, change the textSize attribute of the TextView control to the dimension resource you just created. Rerun the application and view the result. 3. Add a new...

Declaring a widget in the AndroidManifest AndroidSystem

Thu, 17 May 2012 02:15:27 GMT

First, declare the BroadcastReceiver in your application's AndroidManifest.xml file. lt action gt lt intent-filter gt The lt receiver gt element has the following attributes android name - specifies the BroadcastReceiver or AppWidgetProvider class. android label - specifies the string resource that will be shown by the widget picker as the label. android icon - specifies the drawable resource that will be shown by the widget picker as the icon. The lt intent-filter gt element tells the...

Getting an EGL Context OpenGL 3D

Thu, 17 May 2012 02:12:33 GMT

In the Android SDK distribution, the EGL API is available in the package javax.microedition. khronos.egl.EGL10. You can read more about using this package at http java.sun.com Note Although this URL points to a web site about Java, it's relevant because Android uses the same API. All of the site's information on EGL is applicable to Android OpenGL programming as well. Getting an EGL context involves the following steps 1. Get an implementation of EGL10. 4. Specify a device-specific...

Using Camera to Provide Depth Perception in 2D OpenGL 3D

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:51:08 GMT

The graphics package in Android provides another animation-related or more accurately, transformation-related class called Camera. You can use this class to provide depth perception by projecting a 2D image moving in 3D space onto a 2D surface. For example, you can take our ListView and move it back from the screen by 10 pixels along the z axis and rotate it by 30 degrees around the y axis. Here is an example of manipulating the matrix using a Camera protected void applyTransformation float...

Alpha Blending I Can See Through You Android Games 2

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:09:50 GMT

Alpha blending in OpenGL ES is pretty easy to enable. We only need two method calls gl.glEnable GL10.GL_BLEND gl.glBlendFunc GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_0NE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA The first method call should be familiar it just tells OpenGL ES that it should apply alpha blending to all triangles we render from this point on. The second method is a little bit more involved. It specifies how the source and destination color should be combined. If you remember what we discussed in Chapter 3, the way a...

PhoneGap Simulator CrossPlatform

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:47:15 GMT

You can also test your application in a cross-platform Windows, Mac, and so forth PhoneGap simulator written in Adobe Air. You can find the simulator at http phonegap.com download.The simulator uses the WebKit browser that is built into Adobe Air to run your application. Start the simulator and choose your starting index.html file or equivalent. This is very helpful since the build and test process can be very time-consuming using the native device SDKs. You must always test using the device...

Creating and Using a Widget Configuration Activity ApplicationDevelopment

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:43:06 GMT

In some cases an App Widget will be significantly more useful if the user is given the opportunity to customize the data it displays and how the data is displayed. This is particularly important given that multiple instances of the same widget can be added to the home screen. An App Widget configuration Activity is an Activity that is launched immediately when a widget is added to the home screen. It can be any Activity within your application, provided it has an Intent Filter for the...

Flashing the Lights ApplicationDevelopment

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:50:55 GMT

Notifications also include properties to configure the color and flash frequency of the device's LED. Each device may have different limitations with regard to control over the LED. Where the color you specify is not available, as close an approximation as possible will be used. When using LEDs to convey information to the user keep this limitation in mind and avoid making it the only way such information is made available. The ledARGB property can be used to set the LED's color, while...

Some Notes on Transformation Matrices OpenGL 3D

Wed, 16 May 2012 04:24:58 GMT

As you have seen in this chapter, matrices are key to transforming views and animations. We will now briefly explore some key methods of the Matrix class. These are the primary operations on a matrix The first operation resets a matrix to an identity matrix, which causes no change to the view when applied. setScale is responsible for changing size, setTranslate is responsible for changing position to simulate movement, and setRotate is responsible for changing orientation. setSkew is...

Grid Controls OpenGL 3D

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:42:33 GMT

Most widget toolkits offer one or more grid-based controls. Android has a GridView control that can display data in the form of a grid. Note that although we use the term data here, the contents of the grid can be text, images, and so on. The GridView control displays information in a grid. The usage pattern for the GridView is to define the grid in the XML layout see Listing 4-20 , and then bind the data to the grid using an android.widget.ListAdapter. Listing 4-20. Definition of a GridView in...

Exploring common views AndroidPlatform

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:19:23 GMT

Android provides a healthy set of View objects in the android.view package. These objects range from familiar constructs like the EditText, Spinner, and TextView that we have already seen in action to more specialized widgets such as AnalogClock, Gallery, DatePicker, TimePicker, and VideoView. For a quick glance at some of the more eye-catching views, check out the sample page in the Android documentation The class diagram in figure 3.4 provides a high-level snapshot of what the overall View...

This chapter covers AndroidPlatform

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:07:41 GMT

Using the network to retrieve and store data Every mobile provider supports voice and data networks of one or more types. The interesting part with an Android-enabled device is really the data network, along with the power to link the data available on the network to interesting applications. Those applications can then be built with the open Intent- and Service-based approach you learned about in previous chapters. That approach combines built-in or custom intents, such as fully capable web...

Initializing the Game Loop AndroidGames

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:52:27 GMT

This is the most important function in this file. It starts the native game loop and will block execution. For this reason, this function should be called within a Java thread. The critical steps shown in Listing 6-15 follow 1. Save a reference to the Java VM is using env - gt GetJavaVM env, amp g_VM . This reference will be later used within the C to Java callbacks. 2. Convert the Java string array jargv to a C array char . The C array will be send to the native game loop. The key aspects of...

To star or unstar an location GoogleVoice

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:46:05 GMT

You can star any location or labeled feature on a map. 1 Touch amp hold a location or labeled feature on a map. 2 Touch the balloon that opens. 3 Touch the gray star at the top of the screen to star the location. Or touch a gold star to unstar that location. The star turns gold and a gold star is added to the map at that location. Touch a star for more information about that location. Touch a star for more information about that location.

Initiating a Phone Call Android Google Sdk

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:20:23 GMT

The next line in our program looks like this startActivity callIntent This looks like we want to start an Activity, using the Intent object we created. But why don't we need to specify an instance, or even a class, when we call startActivity Because our program is an instance of the Activity class. We are calling a method of the class this object is an instance of. We could have used the following instead Our program is already an Activity, but we now want to start a new instance of the...

Recipe Passing Primitive Data Types Between Activities Android SDK 2

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:26:08 GMT

Sometimes data needs to be passed to a launched activity. Sometimes a launched activity creates data that needs to be passed back to the calling activity. For example, a final score of a game needs to be returned to a high-scores screen.The different ways to pass information between activities are Declare the relevant variable in the calling activity for example, public int finalScore and set it in the launched activity for example, CallingActivity.finalScore score . Attach extras onto Bundles...

Info Xen AndroidDevices

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:18:49 GMT

his smaller version of the X10 weighs 120g and has a slide-out keyboard. The tactile rubber back keeps it firmly in your grip, but conceals a metal shell with rather sharp edges. Hardware buttons are limited to Home, Back, and an Android button that unlocks the phone and brings up the onscreen keypad. Icons sit in each corner of the screen for email, phone, music and contacts. You can optionally sync contacts and import from your SIM. A subtle up arrow opens up the main bill of fare when tapped...

Summary 1 Application Development 2

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:58:47 GMT

In this hour, you've seen how different Android applications can be designed using three application components Context, Activity, and Intent. Each Android application comprises one or more activities. Top-level application functionality is accessible through the application context. Each activity has a special function and usually its own layout, or user interface. An activity is launched when the Android system matches an intent object with the most appropriate application activity, based on...

Changing Camera Settings OpenGL 3D

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:37:35 GMT

To understand the coordinates better, let us experiment with the camera-related methods and see how they affect the triangle that you drew. Remember that these are the points of our triangle -0.5,-0.5,0 0.5,-0.5,0 0,0.5,0 . The following three camera-related methods yield the triangle as it appears in Figure 10-3 Look at the screen origin from 5 units away from the front of the screen GLU.gluLookAt gl, 0,0,5, 0,0,0, 0,1,0 Set the height to 2 units and depth to 4 units gl.glFrustumf -ratio,...

Qa Xux Application Development 2

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:22:02 GMT

Q. If I'm storing images locally, can I use the ImageSwitcher setImageURI method instead of the setImageDrawable method A. Of course. In fact, we recommend it. If the graphic is locally available, use the setImageURI method to greatly simplify the code for loading a graphic into an ImageSwitcher or ImageView control. There is no need for streams or Drawable objects in memory. Q. When using a ViewSwitcher control, can I set my own animations A. Yes, you can create any animation you want between...

Initialization Parameters in AndroidManifestxml Android Google Sdk

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:41:18 GMT

As Chapter 3 explained, we told Android to launch Microjobs.java as the first Activity for MJAndroid. We defined that on the Application tab of the AndroidManifest.xml editor. The first part of the XML code that results from that choice is shown here lt xml version 1.0 encoding utf-8 gt lt manifest android versionCode 1 lt uses-permission gt lt uses-permission android name gt lt uses-permission gt lt uses-permission gt lt uses-permission gt application lt uses-library gt lt activity android...

Check Boxes CrossPlatform

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:11:58 GMT

All smartphone mobile platforms provide UI widgets for check boxes to represent boolean or on off values. All of them have some concept of a check and most have the box that surrounds them. This is the way traditional browsers have implemented checkboxes. Keep in mind here we are talking about native components. To override this functionality in the iOS mobile WebKit browser using CSS, refer to Listing 10-1. This code example assumes you are using a check box image that looks like Figure 10-10....

Basic Tweening Animation Types OpenGL 3D

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:46:49 GMT

Before we design the test harness to apply the various tweening animations, we'll give you some detail on the basic types of tweening animation Scale animation You use this type of animation to make a view smaller or larger either on the x axis or on the y axis. You can also specify the pivot point around which you want the animation to take place. Rotate animation You use this to rotate a view around a pivot point by a certain number of degrees. Translate animation You use this to move a view...

Summary Hlr AndroidJava

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:18:59 GMT

Java version 5 introduced the concurrency utilities to simplify the development of concurrent applications. The concurrency utilities are organized into executor, synchronizer, concurrent collection, lock, and atomic variable categories, and leverage the low-level Threading API in their implementations. An executor decouples task submission from task-execution mechanics and is described by the Executor, ExecutorService, and ScheduledExecutorService interfaces. A synchronizer facilitates common...

Bionic libc 1 ApplicationFramework

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:28:42 GMT

Doesn't support certain POSIX features Not compatible with Gnu Libc glibc All native code must be compiled against bionic

Abstracting the World of Mr Nom Model View Controller Android Games 2

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:45:12 GMT

If you are a long-time coder, you've probably heard about design patterns. They are more or less strategies to design your code given a scenario. Some of them are academic, and some have uses in the real world. For game development we can borrow some ideas from the Model-View-Controller MVC design pattern. It's often used by the database and web community to separate the data model from the presentation layer and the data manipulation layer. We won't strictly follow this design pattern, but...

Using MetaAnnotations in Annotation Type Declarations AndroidJava

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:48:54 GMT

Each of the Override, Deprecated, and SuppressWarnings annotation types is itself annotated with meta-annotations annotations that annotate annotation types . For example, Listing 5-18 shows you that the SuppressWarnings annotation type is annotated with two meta-annotations. Listing 5-18. The annotated SuppressWarnings type declaration Retention value SOURCE The Target annotation type, which is located in the java.lang.annotation package, identifies the kinds of application elements to which...

Specifying Minimum System API Version AndroidSystem

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:01:51 GMT

If your application requires a specific minimum version of the Android platform, you can specify that version as an API Level identifier in the application's manifest file. Doing so ensures that your application can only be installed on devices that are running a compatible version of the Android system. To specify the minimum system version in the manifest, use this attribute android minSdkVersion An integer value corresponding to the code version of the Android platform. When preparing to...

Radio Buttons CrossPlatform

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:40:35 GMT

Radio buttons allow you to choose one item in a list of options. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile use a standard radio-button implementation that shows an empty circle when not selected and a filled circle when it has been selected. Android uses the same implementation as BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, but instead of the entire circle being filled, only the center of the circle is filled. iOS has the concept of radio buttons, but Apple suggests using pickers such as date pickers instead in their...

A LookAt Camera Android Games 2

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:24:05 GMT

The second type of camera usually found in games is a simple look-at camera. It is defined by the following An up vector. Think of this as an arrow coming out of the top of your skull, pointing in the direction of the top of your skull. A look-at position in space or alternatively a direction vector. We'll use the former. A near and far clipping plane distance. The only difference from the Euler camera is the way we encode the orientation of the camera. In this case we specify the orientation...

Using HTTP Networking Application Development 2

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:05:37 GMT

The most common network transfer protocol is Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP . Most commonly used HTTP ports are open and available for use on phone networks. A fast way to get to a network resource is by retrieving a stream to the content. Many Android interfaces for reading data accept streams. One such example is XmlPullParser. The setInput method of XmlPullParser class takes an InputStream. Previously, you retrieved this stream from the resources. Now, however, you can get it from a...

The RadioButton Control OpenGL 3D

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:47:51 GMT

Radio-button controls are an integral part of any UI toolkit. A radio button gives the user several choices and forces her to select a single item. To enforce this single-selection model, radio buttons generally belong to a group and each group is forced to have only one item selected at a time. To create a group of radio buttons in Android, first create a RadioGroup and then populate the group with radio buttons. Listing 4-15 and Figure 4-5 show an example. Listing 4-15. Using Android...

OpenGL the Native Way AndroidGames

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:29:30 GMT

In the previous section, you saw how a pure Java OpenGL application works from the ground up. This applies if you write an application from scratch in Java. However, if you already have a C OpenGL renderer and wish to interface with Android, you probably don't want to rewrite your application especially if it has thousands of lines of code . This would consume significant time and resources, and more than likely, give you terrible headache. To understand how you can maximize the return on your...

InterProcess Communication and AIDL in the androidinternaltelephony Package Android Google Sdk

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:28:39 GMT

Many of the internal packages use the remote methods feature discussed in Remote Methods and AIDL on page 265. The TelephonyManager and PhoneStateListener classes rely on this to communicate with PhoneApp. The ServiceManager class is also used. Figure 15-1. Layers of telephony packages To marshall data for remote methods, the package includes AIDL files. For instance, the following AIDL comes from IPhoneStateListener.aidl oneway interface IPhoneStateListener void onServiceStateChanged in...

Caveats of Porting OpenGL Games to Android AndroidGames

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:05:40 GMT

Today's smart phones have become pretty powerful. They feature a GPU capable of advanced graphics. Nevertheless, when it comes to writing advanced 3D games for embedded devices using OpenGL, several issues should be considered. Consider a game like Quake, which has been ported to multiple smart phones. This game uses immediate mode drawing for specifying geometry. For example, consider the following snippet to render an arbitrary polygon and corresponding texture Bind some texture glBegin...

drawable marker AndroidPlatform

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:09:34 GMT

this.items items this.context context this.populate public BuoyOverlayItem createItem int i return this . items .get i lt -1 Override protected boolean onTap int i Get data final BuoyData bd this . items .get i .buoyData lt -I and display LayoutInflater inflater LayoutInflater.from this.context View bView null TextView title TextView . . . rest of view inflation omitted for brevity new AlertDialog.Builder this.context .setView bView .setPositiveButton More Detail, new...

The TextureRegion Class Android Games 2

Mon, 14 May 2012 04:16:03 GMT

Since we've worked with texture regions already, it should be straightforward to figure out what we need. We know how to convert from pixel coordinates to texture coordinates. We want to have a class where we can specify pixel coordinates of an image in a texture atlas that then stores the corresponding texture coordinates for the atlas region for further processing e.g., when we want to render a sprite . Without further ado, Listing 8-16 shows our TextureRegion class. Listing 8-16....

srcirdcex0713EX0713java AndroidSDK

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:11:01 GMT

VideoView MM, amp S ft gtfftH strVideo Path o g j Cft playVideo Ifc i VideoView ft Mf , iM SW amp i VideoView. setVideoURI , ffDfH Aft ifc3 URI , ffiil URI.parseO flfftfrJ tfSfr , Video View.startOiMi SMftPfrlfc, VideoView fM ft fiJJijf iaa ffi IW OTftM iii , JsBlli MU User VideoView import android.app.Activity import android.graphics.PixelFormat import android.media.MediaPlayer import android.net.Uri import android.os.Bundle import android.util.Log import android.view.View import...

Laying Out CodeListing

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:40:05 GMT

Most XML screens will be wrapped in a layout object. Layout objects come in many different flavors, each of which you'll look at really quickly and then check out with a simple example in the following sections. Caution At compile time, these XML layout files are parsed and packed by Android into a tight binary format. This saves monstrous amounts of parsing time on startup. However, it means that the XML files cannot be changed by your code during runtime. More specifically, you may be able to...

More Initialization of MicroJobsjava Android Google Sdk

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:29:21 GMT

The previous section was a rather long digression into XML Layout files, but as you can see, that is where a lot of the initialization of the application's user interface takes place where views are defined, named, and given attributes where the screen is layed out and where hints are given to the layout manager describing the way we would like the screen to look. Let's get back to the Java code that brings up the application, starting where we left off in MicroJobs.java db new...

daytimec AndroidPlatform

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:36:26 GMT

The Daytime Server application can be broken into two basic functional parts. The first is the TCP socket server. Our Daytime Server application binds to TCP port 1024 when looking for new connections. Ordinarily a daytime service binds to TCP port 13 however, Linux has a security feature where only trusted users can bind to any port below 1023. The second feature is the insertion of data into a SQLite database. Listing 13.8 shows the code for the Daytime Server application. include lt time.h...

Defining an Android Application The Manifest File Android Games 2

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:40:09 GMT

An Android application can consist of a multitude of different components Activities These are user-facing components that present a UI to interact with. Services These are processes that work in the background and don't have a visible UI. A service might be responsible for polling a mail server for new e-mails, for example. Content providers These components make parts of your application data available to other applications. Intents These are messages created by the system or applications...

An Earthquake Monitoring Service Example ApplicationDevelopment

Sun, 13 May 2012 13:40:35 GMT

In this chapter you'll modify the Earthquake example you started in Chapter 5 and continued to enhance in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 . In this example you'll move the earthquake updating and processing functionality into a separate Service component. Prepared for ASHLEE KABAT, email akabat spam.la Order number 56760408 This PDF is for the purchaser's personal use in accordance with the Wrox Terms of Service and under US copyright as stated on this book's copyright page. If you did not purchase this...

Resource Directories and General Attributes Android SDK 2

Sun, 13 May 2012 13:27:25 GMT

The UI display utilizes developer-generated resource files, some of which are discussed in Chapter 2,Application Basics Activities and Intents, in the context of the directory structure of an Android project. For completeness, the entire set of resource directories is summarized here res anim Frame-by-frame animation or tweened animation objects. res drawable Image resources. Note these images can be modified and optimized during compilation. res layout eXtensible Markup Language XML files...

The Basic Approach AndroidSystem

Sun, 13 May 2012 13:16:39 GMT

Here is a high level overview of what you need to know to get started in creating your own View components 1. Extend an existing View class or subclass with your own class. 2. Override some of the methods from the superclass. The superclass methods to override start with 'on', for example, onDrawO, onMeasureO, and onKeyPownO. This is similar to the on events in Activity or ListActivity that you override for lifecycle and other functionality hooks. 3. Use your new extension class. Once...

Download PhoneGap HTMLApps

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:40:04 GMT

Now that we have the Android SDK installed, we can use PhoneGap to create an Android project based on our web app. To ensure the instructions in this book will continue to work long into the future, I have forked the main phonegap-android project and intend to keep a relatively static version. Once you become comfortable using my version of PhoneGap for your Android development, you might want to visit the main page for the PhoneGap project to see if there is anything new and exciting that you...

Saving Simple Application Data ApplicationDevelopment

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:16:36 GMT

The data-persistence techniques in Android provide options for balancing speed, efficiency, and robustness. gt Shared Preferences When storing UI state, user preferences, or application settings, you want a lightweight mechanism to store a known set of values. Shared Preferences let you save groups of key value pairs of primitive data as named preferences. gt Saved Application State Activities include specialized event handlers to record the current UI state when your application is moved to...

Setting Up an AlertDialog Builder with a User View OpenGL 3D

Sun, 13 May 2012 11:17:59 GMT

Let's combine steps 2 through 4 from our instructions to create a prompt dialog loading the XML view and setting it up in the alert-dialog builder. Android provides a class called android. view.Layoutlnflater to create a View object from an XML layout definition file. We will use an instance of the Layoutlnflater to populate the view for our dialog based on the XML layout file see Listing 5-23 . Listing 5-23. Inflating a Layout into a Dialog Layoutlnflater li Layoutlnflater.from ctx View view...

The androidinternaltelephonygsm Package Android Google Sdk

Sun, 13 May 2012 08:23:04 GMT

Many of the classes and interfaces in the previous section are typical of a Java API that can have multiple implementations. The implementations of the API defined in the telephony.internal package correspond to a library used in the RIL. To better understand this API, we will look at one implementation here that supports GSM. Thus, this section delves further into the telephony internals of Android, looking especially at how the interfaces and abstract base classes are implemented and...

Summary Wti AndroidEmulator

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:27:12 GMT

Each Android application has a specially formatted XML file called AndroidManifest.xml.This file describes the application's identity in great detail. Some information you must define within the Android manifest file includes the application's name and version information, what application components it contains, which device configurations it requires, and what permissions it needs to run. The Android manifest file is used by the Android operating system to install, upgrade, and run the...

Chapter 3 Learning ObjectOriented Language Features AndroidJava

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:13:30 GMT

1. Implementation inheritance is inheritance through class extension. 2. Java supports implementation inheritance by providing reserved word extends. 3. A subclass can have only one superclass because Java does not support multiple implementation inheritance. 4. You prevent a class from being subclassed by declaring the class final. 5. The answer is false the super call can only appear in a constructor. 6. If a superclass declares a constructor with one or more parameters, and if a subclass...

Searching with SearchManager SampleProjects

Sat, 12 May 2012 08:08:50 GMT

One of the firms behind the Open Handset Alliance Google has a teeny-weeny Web search service, one you might have heard of in passing. Given that, it's not surprising that Android has some built-in search capabilities. Specifically, Android has baked in the notion of searching not only on the device for data, but over the air to Internet sources of data. Your applications can participate in the search process by triggering searches or perhaps by allowing your application's data to be searched....

Wireless Application Protocol WAP AndroidEmulator

Sat, 12 May 2012 08:04:42 GMT

As it turned out, allowing direct phone access to the Internet didn't scale well for mobile. By this time, professional websites were full color and chock full of text, images, and other sorts of media.These sites relied on JavaScript, Flash, and other technologies to enhance the user experience, and they were often designed with a target resolution of 800x600 pixels and higher. When the first clamshell phone, the Motorola StarTAC, was released in 1996, it merely had an LCD 10-digit segmented...

Creating Your Widget Intent Receiver and Adding It to the Application Manifest ApplicationDevelopment

Sat, 12 May 2012 07:22:45 GMT

Widgets are implemented as Intent Receivers with Intent Filters that catch broadcast Intents, which request widget updates using the AppWidget.ACTION_APPWIDGET_UPDATE, deleted, enabled, and DiSABLED actions. You can create your widget by extending the intentReceiver class directly and interpreting those broadcast Intents by overriding the onReceive method. The AppWidgetProvider class provides a simplified alternative by encapsulating the Intent processing and presenting you with event handlers...

Android System Debug Tools Android SDK 2

Sat, 12 May 2012 03:23:05 GMT

Android is built on top of Linux, so many Linux tools can be leveraged. For example, to show the applications currently running and the resources they are using, the top command can be used. The following command can be issued at the command line when a device is connected to a host computer through USB cable or the emulator is running An example output from this command is shown in Figure 12.9. The top command also shows the percentage of CPU and memory used in the overall system. Another...

Shadows Gradients and Filters Android Google Sdk

Sat, 12 May 2012 01:41:48 GMT

PathEffect, MaskFilter, ColorFilter, Shader, and ShadowLayer are all attributes of Paint. Anything drawn with Paint can be drawn under the influence of one or more of these transformations. The top several widgets in Figure 12-5 give examples of some of these effects. Widgets 1 and 2 demonstrate shadows. Shadows are currently controlled by the setShadowLayer method. The arguments, a blur radius and X and Y displacements, control the apparent distance and position of the light source that...

AndroidViewsjava Axf AndroidProgrammers

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:49:54 GMT

The last step to create this Activity is to edit the AndroidViews.java. If you want to call the testEditText Activity from the main AndroidViews Activity, you must add code to the AndroidViews.java. Compare the following code with that in your current AndroidViews.java. Add the needed code to complete your file. package import android.app.Activity import android.os.Bundle import android.view.Menu import android.content.Intent public class AndroidViews extends Activity Called when the Activity...

Recording Sound with Audio Record ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:53:57 GMT

Use the AudioRecord class to record audio directly from the hardware buffers. Create a new Audio Record object, specifying the source, frequency, channel configuration, audio encoding, and buffer size. int bufferSize channelConfiguration, audioEncoding AudioRecord audioRecord new frequency, channelConfiguration, audioEncoding, bufferSize For privacy reasons, Android requires that the record_audio manifest permission be included in your manifest. lt uses-permission The frequency, audio encoding,...

Introducing SQLite Databases ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:26:38 GMT

Using SQLite you can create independent relational databases for your applications. Use them to store and manage complex, structured application data. Android databases are stored in the folder on your device or emulator . By default all databases are private, accessible only by the application that created them. Database design is a big topic that deserves more thorough coverage than is possible within this book. It is worth highlighting that standard database best practices still apply in...

Introducing the Connectivity Manager ApplicationDevelopment

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:10:41 GMT

The ConnectivityManager represents the Network Connectivity Service. It's used to monitor the state of network connections, configure failover settings, and control the network radios. To access the Connectivity Manager, use getSystemService, passing in Context.CONNECTIVITY_ service as the service name, as shown in Listing 13-12. LISTING 13-12 Accessing the Connectivity Manager Prepared for ASHLEE KABAT, email akabat spam.la Order number 56760408 This PDF is for the purchaser's personal use in...

Defining the Game World Android Games 2

Fri, 11 May 2012 07:38:50 GMT

The classic chicken-and-egg problem haunts us again. You learned in the last chapter that we have a correspondence between world units e.g., meters and pixels. Our objects are defined physically in world space. Bounding shapes and positions are given in meters, velocities are given in meters per second. The graphical representations of our objects are defined in pixels, though, so we have to have some sort of mapping. We overcome this problem by first defining a target resolution for our...

Hello World Android Style Android Games 2

Fri, 11 May 2012 04:48:12 GMT

With our development set up, we can now finally create our first Android project in Eclipse. The ADT plug-in installed a couple of wizards for us to make the creation of new Android projects really easy. There are two ways to create a new Android project. The first one works by right-clicking in the Package Explorer view see Figure 2-4 and selecting New gt Project from the pop-up menu. In the new dialog, select Android Project under the Android category. As you can see, there are a lot of other...

Pre and Post AndroidMedia

Thu, 10 May 2012 23:07:36 GMT

Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are several more that may prove to be useful to you. Each of them also has a pre and a post version. These enable you to do more than one transformation at a time in sequence. For instance, you could do a preScale and then setRotate or a setScale and then postRotate. Changing the order of when they occur could yield vastly different results depending on the operations performed. Figure 3-11 shows the results of the following two method...

Creating A Settings Activity For The Earthquake Viewer ApplicationDevelopment

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:58:43 GMT

In Chapter 5 you created an earthquake monitor that showed a list of recent earthquakes based on an RSS feed. In the following example you'll build an Activity to set application preferences for this earthquake viewer. It will let users configure settings for a more personalized experience. You'll provide the option to toggle automatic updates, control the frequency of updates, and filter the minimum earthquake magnitude displayed. Later in this chapter you'll replace this Activity with a...

How OpenGL ES Calculates Lighting Vertex Normals Android Games 2

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:09:04 GMT

You know that the intensity of the reflected light bouncing back from an object depends on the angle it hits the surface of the object. OpenGL ES uses this fact to calculate lighting. It does so by using vertex normals, which we have to define in our code, just as we define texture coordinates or vertex colors. Figure 11-4 shows a sphere with its vertex normals. Figure 11-4 . sphere and its vertex normals Figure 11-4 . sphere and its vertex normals Normals are simply unit-length vectors that...

A Bit About Inflation SampleProjects

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:30:38 GMT

In this case, inflation means the act of converting an XML layout specification into the actual tree of View objects the XML represents. This is undoubtedly a tedious bit of code take an element, create an instance of the specified View class, walk the attributes, convert those into property setter calls, iterate over all child elements, lather, rinse, repeat. The good news is that the fine folk on the Android team wrapped all that up into a class called LayoutInflater that we can use...

Object Serialization and Deserialization AndroidJava

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:48:13 GMT

Although you can use the data stream classes to stream primitive type values and String objects, you cannot use these classes to stream non-String objects. Instead, you must use object serialization and deserialization to stream objects of arbitrary types. Object serialization is a virtual machine mechanism for serializing object state into a stream of bytes. Its deserialization counterpart is a virtual machine mechanism for deserializing this state from a byte stream. NOTE An object's state...

Best App for Document Storage Best Android Apps

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:15:16 GMT

Teradesk distinguishes itself through its flexibility, utility, and ease of use. Being a virtual file storage and remote file access tool, Teradesk uses secure encryption to transfer files to and from your Android device, and will automatically resume if your file transfer is interrupted. This app can process file transfers in the background while you work on something else. Teradesk can access your files that are on a server or device you point to, or that are up in the cloud of servers that...

Resources and Assets Android 1 6 SDK

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:18:40 GMT

Resources are an integral part of an Android application. In general, these are external elements that you want to include and reference within your application, like images, audio, video, text strings, layouts, themes, etc. Every Android application contains a directory for resources res and a directory for assets assets . Assets are used less often, because their applications are far fewer. You only need to save data as an asset when you need to read the raw bytes. The directories for...

Track Your Apps Location AndroidMarket

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:06:58 GMT

Another helpful feature of most analytics software is that you can track your app's use by location. This requires the user to opt in to provide this data and therefore does not give a complete picture of usage because not all users will permit it. However, it will give you a general idea of where your app is being used in different parts of the world. This can help you make advertising and product decisions. For example, if you see that your app is doing really well in the UK, you can dig a...

Info Pms VideoGames

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:15:06 GMT

arguments are the variables that the method takes in when called. They are separated by commas. For example, if you want a method to take in two arguments, an int and a double, you would use the following code public void sample int i, double d Inside of the method, i and d are the variable names of the arguments that are passed in. To return a value, use the following code lt variabie gt must be the return type you specified when you created the method. To call a method the one named sample ,...

Indexed Vertices Because Reuse Is Good for You Android Games 2

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:29:17 GMT

Up until this point, we have always defined lists of triangles, where each triangle has its own set of vertices. We have actually only ever drawn a single triangle, but adding more would not have been a big deal. There are cases, however, where two or more triangles can share some vertices. Let's think about how we'd render a rectangle with our current knowledge. We'd simply define two triangles that would have two vertices with the same positions, colors, and texture coordinates. We can do...

Using Intents to Record Video ApplicationDevelopment

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:25:16 GMT

The easiest way to initiate video recording is using the ACTION_VIDEO_CAPTURE Media Store static constant in an Intent passed to startActivityForResult. startActivityForResult new This will launch the native video camera Activity, allowing users to start, stop, review, and retake their video, and preventing you from having to rewrite the entire video camera application. The video capture action supports two optional extras, available as static constants from the MediaStore class gt extra_output...

Intent Objects Used in InterProcess Communication Android Google Sdk

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:40:47 GMT

We'll start with how the client makes a request. Several classes are involved We've seen Activity objects used throughout this book. The Context class, a parent class of Activity and Service, contains the methods for sending Intent objects from one Activity object to another, whether in the same process or a different one. So every place you have an Activity subclass which is nearly every place in your application that needs to display a UI you have the methods for slinging Intent objects...