Develop Reference

Development Logs and Testing for OpenLocate

I'm hoping to use the OpenLocate library to help post location data in my application. I've been trying to test that it is working before I start posting events over HTTP calls sent somewhere.
I want to verify two main things
Events are being collected at the frequency I expect
Events are being stored in the database
I've verified that OpenLocate is tracking when I run the app by printing out the OpenLocate.getInstance().isTracking() flag. I've also tried using Stetho to inspect my package to see if I could read the db, but unfortunately nothing shows up.
If anyone has some experience with OpenLocate and can give me some info that would be great.

What is most simple way to send notification of unexpected events to users of Android application?

For example I expect this kind of situation: data in my application lost relevance and so it usless until update. And until update it have to show users some predefined message.
Is here any simple and free solution to this task?
Guess I can use some server to somehow send simple messages... but it sounds way too complicated.
If this is important I use Xamarin.
Update: main difficulty here is fact - my application can't in any way define if it's outdated or not. This may happen in random moment.

Although the requirement is not very clear I assume Update here means app update.
each time user launches app make call to an api on ur server to check if user needs to update app
If that returns true take user to a static view that says app needs update and redirects user to google play to install updates

If you want to avoid using a server, you should try Firebase (https://firebase.google.com/). More specifically, you should use Firebase Remote Config (https://firebase.google.com/features/remote-config/).
Define in a key-value pair of something like minimum_app_version_required in Firebase Remote Config. Every time user opens the your app, compare the values of app version and minimum_app_version_required that you are getting from Firebase console and show a dialog box accordingly. You can also change the value of minimum_app_version_required anytime you want.

Just set some internal flag. That when that situation occurs, you can set the flag to true and just edit whatever layout element you are using such as listView or any other element with your predefined messages saved in strings.xml. You can also build any custom pop up screen, depends how you want to show them. Let me know if you didn't understand or exactly how you want?

Need to implement versioning for this problem. To achieve this, you have to maintain a version number in server, this is the version number you app will have to save and use it to validate with server. If both are not same, then app will get the latest data from the server.

Piwik tracking in an android application

I want to do data analytics for my android application using Piwik.
In Piwik's documentation, they suggest using GitHub.
I got the Piwik API and download the following file:
https://github.com/piwik/piwik-java-tracking
which I don't know how to use.
What are the steps needed to get the data analysis using the Piwik working?
What should I do next?

I also would like to implement piwik tracking in my android app.
This is what I understood so far:
Unlike for iOS/MacOS applications, there is currently no SDK to help us out.
Piwik developers have a ticket opened in their bugtracker about this, which shows they're aware of the issue and willing to improve the situation, but it will take some time before this android tracking SDK is released.
At the moment, the Piwik team encourages android and Java developers to use the piwik-java-tracking library you mentioned. This is basically just a java wrapper for the web tracking API reference, which helps you to generate Tracking Request URLs to send to your Piwik instance.
This piwik-java-tracking project lacks documentation (there is none that I know of in Github), but there is javadoc in the java files.
Basically what you need to do to track an action is to:
Create a new instance of SimplePiwikTracker
Feed it with whatever values and parameters you wish to track using the various setters available
When you're done, get the URL using one of the methods defined in the PiwikTracker interface, depending of the type of "event" you want to track
Send a request to that URL to actually track your action into you Piwik instance.
This has several drawbacks:
If you need bulk tracking, you'll have to figure out a way of doing so. The web tracking API reference states you can use use a HTTP POST request containing a JSON object to do it.
It doesn't provide any help to handle the case where user is offline. If you need to, you'll have to find a way to cache your tracking request (in an sqlite database for example) and bulk send them when the user is back online.
You'll need to handle possible exceptions raised by network error for the tracking request, to make tat tracking does not interfere with your app normal behavior.
Be sure to read this article too. It gives you an overview of what you need to do to get up & running.
This is what I understood so far. I may update this answer as I progress in implementing piwik tracking in my own app.
Good luck.
Edit: I just noticed that Piwik released "Piwik SDK Android". There are some instruction on how to get this working in the project's wiki.

Facebook SDK for Android: Trying to get a notification when one "likes/comment" the post made by my Android app

I'm fairly new to Facebook SFD for Android.
What I'm trying to achieve is an Android app that uses facebook login, post to the user timeline and gets notified whenever one is commenting or liking that post.
I went thru Facebook tutorials for login and for Publish to Feed.
All went well.
Now I'm struggling with the last part. I don't see how to be notified whenever there is a like or comments. I browsed the web and stackoverflow forum without any success. I'm guessing that there is a mechanism to be notified by Facebook and that I don't have to start a process just to monitor the post...
Anyone could give me a hint on the API to use?
I'm currently looking at "Creating Object Types" section Associating Actions with Object Creation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/creating-object-types) but it looks like this describes how to do for facebook web app, and not for android app.
EDIT
I've found this https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/real-time-updates/ but not quite sure how to "translate" this into Android coding.
If anyone could help me with this, it would be greatly appreciated.

I guess you have to create a page in php that will handle the responses from Facebook, it starts with a
GET response from Facebook that you retrieve with $_GET["name"] in php, and you have to send back a confirmation to Facebook to confirm that the connection works, and Facebook will send you the answer you want via
a POST request ( $_POST["name"] ) (with a json object, containing the informations about the user in object for example, and the different updates in entry).
You can put all these informations in a database, and when the user start your application, you can automatically connect him to a php script that check if the database has new informations for him.
(specifying who he is, with a user variable that he keeps in the memory of his device, and then you ask for informations from the database about this user). I haven't tested, but it should work.

How to consistently and efficiently refresh a listview feed of content?

I currently have several fragment tabs , each with a feed of user statuses, being I have about a 100 other users posting from their accounts there is constantly new data every few minutes. currently the users only choice is to switch fragments back and fourth to get the entire fragment to reload which sends another http request and returns the new data as well as all the old data the user already had. it just doesnt seem efficient, know there has to be a better way. Can someone give me a overview of the most efficient way to keep this data fresh without having the user switch tabs back and fourth?
Is this where using sqlite and/or services comes into play?

Though some developers and designers argue between if content should be refreshed automatically of not, I argue content like streams shouldn't be refreshed automatically unless you are expecting very less incoming data.
I have used twitter4j to stream tweets and refresh automatically in one of my test app, twitter4j has a listener that lets you know when new tweets are received. First I pushed data into ListView as soon as new feeds were received and it was kind of flashy but, efficient. Then I queued up data until it reached certain threshold and pushed data into ListView, it was bit better. I thought it was good enough but, when I monitored my "Data Usage", i quite realized why I shouldn't refresh automatically.
Now here are some example implementation:
(Suggest) Do some type of polling or I recommend you to implement
push(like GCM) to let your client-side know that there's new content
in the server.
(Option) Use SyncAdapter with server triggered sync
(Recommend) Let user be in control, it's more than okay to use
Pull-to-Refresh pattern like Facebook or ActionBar sync button like
Google+. It will not make UserExperience any bad.
Now here's how your sample request API should be like or you can match your own config:
{
"fromIndex": 0,
"toIndex": 10
...
}

well, i'll try to give you a general overview to see if you can get it without the need of getting into deepest details, an idea it just came to my mind:
1- you need to configure your server to retrieve from an "specific" point of the content or retrieve a token that you will pass to the server (on next HttpRequest) to know from where part of the content or from where "index" start to send the content again.
2- you need to have a Listener (i dont know how you are showing your data but this is the case of a ListView) that tells you when the user is closely to get to the end of the ListView and let't say if there are already 10 elements, in element 7 the Listener should call the method to get more content from the server.
3- Yes, you need to keep the data already retrieve in SQLite temporarily, you can't use SharedPreference to keep it because it probably would be a lot of data and maintain it in memory could be a bad idea, writing a file is not an option here neither, so SQLite is your best friend in this case.
Maybe there would be more problems specifics about what you are trying to achieve but to me in a general perspective, those 3 points should at least help you in the direction to go.