The Android compatibility library allowed you to add fragments to the tutorial list (TutList) application for use on devices running Android 1.6 and higher. However, it does not provide perfect compatibility. One sticking point is providing a mechanism to indicate to the user which list item is selected and to show in another fragment, the context for its details (view the article contents, in this case).
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Google IO 2011 took place in early May in San Francisco, California. In the midst of many announcements and tons of information, Android development for Google TV did get a little coverage. As of this writing, most developers cannot yet use Google TVs as a target device for development, but this is about to change. Developers looking to get a head start can follow a few easy tips and be ready when consumers can download applications for their TVs.
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Often times, applications will perform some background operation—maybe while the app is running or maybe triggered on a scheduled alarm. The user won’t know what’s going on, though, unless they are informed of some event. Luckily, Android has an easy notification system that allows applications to display a message in the status bar and provide informative details to the user when something important occurs.
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Many applications can benefit from Shared Preferences – the Android platform’s answer to the persistent storage of application settings. There are many ways to create user interfaces for collecting and displaying persistent settings for users. The easiest way is to use the PreferencesActivity, which provides a consistent look-and-feel with the rest of the platform, including the device system preferences. Learn how to use PreferencesActivity in this tutorial.
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Many applications have a need for regular, background actions to take place. For instance, in the “TutList” application we’ve been building over a recent series of tutorials, the content list is stale until the user initiates a refresh from the options menu. Why can’t the application simply update its data at regular intervals? Well, it can and it should. Let’s implement this new feature right now!
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The tutorial content of the still-unnamed “TutList” application we’ve been building together is getting stale. The data has been the same for over a month now. It’s time to breathe some life into the application by providing it with a means to read fresh Mobiletuts tutorial data on the fly.
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The UI thread is a bad place for lengthy operations like loading data. You never know how long data will take to load, especially if that data is sourced from a content provider or the network. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) introduced the concept of Loaders and, in particular, the CursorLoader class that offloads the work of loading data on a thread, and keeps the data persistent during short term activity refresh events, such as an orientation change. We’ll incorporate the Loader as a new feature in our ongoing tutorial series building a yet-to-be-named tutorial reader application.
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The TutList application that we’ve been working with has a pretty big flaw right now: the article data is not “live”, but static content. In this tutorial, you take several more steps towards a flexible and expandable solution by modifying the application to act as a data-backed content provider.
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In this tutorial, we will run through a quick guide on how to achieve object movement, one of the foundations of game development. We won’t be doing anything fancy, just bouncing a ball across the screen. However, the principles in this tutorial can be easily applied in many more complex scenarios. Without further delay, let’s jump right in!
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Android 3.0, or Honeycomb, came with some fundamental user interface changes, most notably in the form of the Fragment API. When you were reading the last tutorial on how to use fragments, you were probably thinking, “Wow, this is great, but I can’t use any of this because I need to target more than just the Motorola Xoom, the only Android 3.0 device currently on the market.” Luckily for all of us developers, Google has released a library called the Android Compatibility package. This package provides support for the Fragment API as well as other key new features to devices as far back as Android 1.6. As of this writing, that covers 97% of all Android devices actively accessing the Android Market. Learn how to use it in this quick tip.
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