I am thinking about creating a text-based game (similar to gamebooks) for android device. In this moment only theoretically. Do you have some advice please, which way to go?
You probably know how gamebooks works, but the gamebook I want, will be very easy, should work like this:
User has shown some image, text and 3 options (questions), he decides which option to click, then a new page is showing (according to the clicked option) with another image, text and another 3 options. Then again, the user clicks one option, another page opens, etc.
My question is not how to do it programmatically, but how to start with this in Android Studio, what system to use for such game on android or which way to go.
Because I think it has no sense to create intents after each click, as there might be hundreds of clickable options.
I have already created such game on my website with php/html/js, but I want to create it also offline for android.
Intents implies one activity per page - unmaintainable.
You should work with a database and load based on user interaction. So you'll need to learn about Databases and Asynchronicity (working in the background while updating the UI so the user knows)
Related
In my UWP-App I want to create an app internal contactbook page. I can select a contact and return the selected contact back to the page where I opened the contactbook.
In Android where I come from there is a function called "startActivityForResult" which opens an activity gets the return value when finished.
I want to create the same behaviour.
I did this with Frame.Navigate(typeof(ContactBook)) and then when the contact is selected I navigate back with Frame.Navigate(typeof(PreviousPage), selectedContact)
The method Frame.GoBack() is useless in this case because I can't pass a parameter.
How can I solve this problem?
I'm not 100% familiar with android and "startActivityForResult" but are you looking to navigate the entire frame away? There isn't any equivalent in UWP apps, nor is there even really one for WPF's showDialog(), which is probably what you're looking for.
You only have a few options and none of them are really "amazing" per-say.
You can do what you've done above, which is navigate away to the page that has all the contacts, then navigate to a new page but depending on how your app is layed out you might be losing data on the page (since it's a new instance and not a back in the stack so you can't really cache it). You also can't navigate to an instance of a page either, it's only to a new page or through the stack from back / forward. If you use GoBack though and cache the page (using the "required" mode for caching) then you could do some dirty lookup of a stored value in a static class (I know, ugly and not MVVM) or setting a local settings value and reading that in the OnNavigatedTo() method for the page before.
If you don't NEED to use frame movement, you can use a flyout or a custom flyout user control to build a popup of sorts that will display the XAML for the page instead of a page frame. This will have a few difficulties with resizing (so more so for W10 than W10M) and such but you'll be able to not transition out of the frame itself. Then you can see the value of the selected and then on the submit event, you can just work with the page since it's already open.
If need be you could build a custom usercontrol for the flyout and put some custom dependency properties that can be bound for MVVM, it really all depends on what and how you're doing it.
So short answer, there is no fast way of achieveing what you're looking for and that does seem like an issue with the API. I would make the suggestion on the API's uservoice (https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform) and try to get it upvoted!
There isn't any equivalent in UWP apps, nor is there even really one for WPF's showDialog(), which is probably what you're looking for.
#Daniel, no, there is a equivalent in UWP apps. Please refer to Launch an app for results, you can follow the tutorial in that doc to achieve this.
To do this, you will need to create two apps. One is the app which will launch the result app (let say "main app"), the other app here should be the contact-book app. The contact-book app will behavior like a modal window, and the main app will wait for the result of the contact-book app.
But in an UWP app, you can use ContactStore class to access the database that contains contacts.
So, you will need to reconsider if that is necessary to create a contact app by yourself.
Edit:
I may misunderstand your question, you just want your page to behavior like contact-book, not want to create a contact-book by yourself. But anyway, it's the same, you can create another app to hold your page which you want to launch from your main app.
Hello guys (and girls),
I need your help in the matter of how to structure things in an Android app that I'm developing.
So far I have:
a Login activity that shows up right after the app is started
a Main activity that display some options for the user. Among them there is an option to start the device's camera (user taps on an icon that should launch the Camera), take a picture, crop it / rotate it and upload it to a remote server
Now, my question is: how should I organize things in my app logic so that everything will be clear and easy to manage in the future, for the upcoming versions?
I'm thinking like this but I'm not sure if it is the right way:
create a separate activity (eg. PictureCaptureActivity) for the picture capture task
create a separate activity (eg. PictureProcessActivity) for the picture processing tasks (crop and / or rotate - these options will be available via some buttons displayed on screen, in the main menu bar)
create a separate activity (eg. PictureUploadActivity) for the picture upload tasks
Or should I include all these functionality in my MainActivity somehow? Or... ?
Thank you in advance for your guidelines!
Before i start referring you to well written documentation and examples i have one main point i would like to emphasis and convey.
You are referring to Activities where modern Android applications are compartmentalized by Fragments (not that modern, almost 3 years) and the point of that being that the same application can work by utilizing almost 100% of the code on all Android* devices and form factors (mobile, tablet, TV, wear, auto etc.).
Now lets talk business, the best place to start reading on regarding Android is Google:
Design/patterns/application structure - from the android.developers.com documentation site.
Application quality checklist - created by Google following hundreds of case studies and a meticulously planned UX test.
Design guidelines - updated just 2 days ago (16.4.15).
IOSched - Google's display window for Android code where they show how they think an Application should look, feel and behave.
After that i would love to link you to a code lab i co-wrote with a couple of friends and a few blog posts i have written as a follow-up:
AndConLab
My tech blog on Android
Goodluck.
PictureCaptureActivity
Do you want to have a custom interface for taking pictures with the camera, or use an existing application on the phone?
Yes - You will need a PictureCaptureActivity and will have to implement the camera functionality yourself.
No - You can use an Intent to get the user to take a picture using another application and return it to you.
Either way, you will need to look at the Camera documentation.
PictureProcessActivity
You will most likely need to have a PictureProcessActivity to process the pictures in the manner you want.
PictureUploadActivity
The PictureUploadActivity is not really necessary. You could use a Progress Dialog or Progress Bar to show the progress in the PictureProcessActivity.
MainActivity
In my opinion you need at least two activities:
MainActivity / PictureCaptureActivity to take a photo
PictureProcessActivity to process the photo
You could fit it all into one activity by hiding and showing icons in the Action Bar, but I'd rather not because the Activity Documentation states:
An activity is a single, focused thing that the user can do.
Disclaimer: There is no 100% correct way to do this.
I've found this to be very helpful when it comes to code keeping: https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javaguide.html
The one thing I can't stress enough: comment your code
I want to be able to tap the statusbar and the contents in the displayed app to be scrolled up to the top.
Is it technically possible that an app intercept my tap and send the appropriate command to the active app? I have noticed for example that AntTek quick settings shows a drop-down window when swiping down from statusbar. While using the app I did also notice that even by just tapping the statusbar (before beginning to move the finger down), the app seems to already interact with the touch as it dims the screen brightness in preparation to display it's "window" (sorry I use the MS Windows term), so clearly a statusbar tap CAN be sensed by an app.
Starting from this, I wonder if such an app could then send a message to the active program telling it to scroll up.
Is that possible? And if yes, the message must be customized to a particular app (let's say the browser as the most important) or is it standardized so the apps speak the same language between themselves?
I am not a programmer so answers with codesamples might be less helpful than a plain english explanation. Finding out that is possible would lead rather to pursuing a programmer to implement the idea rather than starting to develop it myself.
Thanks :-)
There is an XPosed-module which seems to do exactly what you want.
To use XPosed-modules, you'll need to root your phone and install the XPosed-framework.
The XPosed-module is called "Statusbar Scroll to Top" and its repository can be found here:
http://repo.xposed.info/module/com.mohammadag.statusbarscrolltotop
This will work for almost all app-lists, but for example won't work for browser-content.
If you want to scroll to the top of the page in a browser, then you'll probably do best to get a browser which can do that on its own. (For example Habit Browser has it built-in and respective plugins are available for Firefox.)
Yes it is possible. HiroMacro and Frep can do this, but it requires root. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prohiro.macro&hl=en
(how do they simulate mouse and keyboard interactions on other applications? i have no clue :/ anyone?)
Is it technically possible that an app intercept my tap and send the appropriate command to the active app?
No. One app cannot send fake input to another app, for security reasons.
An android app comprises of several activities. Each activity display a GUI that allows the user to perform a specific task. To take the user from one activity to another, app must use an Intent to define our app’s intent to do something.
An intent can be explicit in order to start a specific component (a specific Activity instance) or implicit in order to start any component that can handle the intended action.
Interacting one app to other app in android
google docs link
So im building an Android application and want to include a search feature to let users use it instead of having to look through the apps many activities and pages. Cant seem to find any info on the best way to do this anywhere else. Thanks in advance
Ok so im building an app that will serve as a game guide for a popular PS3 game. Within the app will be many subjects and topics and i would like to give users the ooption to just use a search bar on the main screen of the app to search throughout the entire application and then provide them with a list of results that are clickable and take them directly to the chosen activity or place in the application. (Say it was an app for making whiskey, i would want them to be able to search on the main page for Jack Daniels instead of hitting buttons that navigate from Mainpage>American Whiskey's>Bourbon>Jack Daniels. )
I seem to be missing something obvious here, why would I want more than one activity per application in Android? Does somebody have some solid examples?
Suppose you are creating a game. You need to have at least two activities - a welcome screen, and the actual game screen. The third activity in this example might be a settings page of the game.
Another example.
Suppose you are developing an application and you need to pop up a dialog, i.e. asking user to set username and password (Standard login screen). You might choose to create and activity and apply a dialog theme to it.
Think about it as the form of desktop application. you don't put everything on one form do you? :)
Sorantis' answer is spot on. Here are other thoughts as well:
Most Web applications, even AJAX-y ones, don't try to have everything in one single page. Some do, and those tend to be the ones that are slow as molasses to load (Evernote, I'm looking at you), have code that looks like a heaping mound of spaghetti, etc. Android is no different.
Also, state management for a super-complex Activity will be nasty, causing you problems with screen rotations and supporting being kicked out of RAM because you screw up onSaveInstanceState(). Memory management in Android assumes lots of cheap activities, not fewer massive ones. Intelligently handling the BACK button requires gobs of your own logic. If you want multiple entry points (e.g., Launcher icon and a MIME type handler and something some other app can call with startActivityForResult() and a search results handler), doing that in one activity will be a nightmare. And so on.
One very basic thing that makes having multiple activities in your program desirable is the use of the back button. I have a form in app after the user clicks search he is presented with another activity showing the results of the search. If he wants to change the search parameters he just can press back and without me doing anything particular he gets back to the search form. Doing this with one activity would be a lot of work for you.
The next thing is the memory management. Android will trigger the garbage collection automaticaly after changing activities that means my whole search form leaves the memory and doesn't take any resources away from the user.