Is there any good library or tutorial about how to implement what i call an application tutorial feature.
When a user open some activity for the first time - the activity doesn't stops but some layer is shown above with custom UI and some elements (that are being highlighted) from the activity are still visible.
If my words seem unclear, just look at the first screenshots here:
Like you can see on the first screens here http://www.android-app-patterns.com/apps/app/209
The only library I found is https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView but it doesn't allow arbitrary ui, afaik.
I work that like this:
Create fragment in activity.
Create style for that fragment (transparent,picture and...).
Create SharedPreference method and save status true when user first time open app ,and show fragment.
Set in onCreate : if (status!=true){ - show fragment -}
Related
I want to display a dialog over an activity but still want to interact with background activity to perform something, while the dialog is being displayed. How can this be done?
You could start a new Thread to perform this action. What I recommend is to implement an AsyncTask
Here's a great tutorial to implement these stuff.
Use a DialogFragment, which is a fragment that displays a dialog window, floating on top of its activity's window. This fragment contains a Dialog object, which it displays as appropriate based on the fragment's state. Control of the dialog (deciding when to show, hide, dismiss it) should be done through the API here, not with direct calls on the dialog, so your Activity remains in control.
A Dialog is still part of the same Activity. They just use different windows.
Since you haven't posted any code, I'll answer you theoretically that when building you Dialog, you should keep a reference to the Activity that holds it. This way you would still be able to communicate with it.
I've found a pretty neat work around for this problem. If you place a transparent view on top of everything you can implement a callback to inject an event into the underlying view, but it doesn't have to be an event it can be any code you want to execute on the background view. I have an open source library that demonstrates this. If you check out my repo at: https://bitbucket.org/warwick/hgdialrepo you will find that this library comes with a demo application. Within this demo app you will find a cog demo. If you examine the code behind the cog demo you will see how this can be achieved.
my first question here... so sorry for duplicates, but i didn't find an answer at all =(
I'm trying to create an app with 3 pages.
Main page - list of videos
Bookmark page - list with all videos bookmarked
settings page - settings and stuff
I first created it with 3 activities. It runs ok, but i found a problem when creating an asyncTask in Main page to download a video. The progress should appear in a progressBar in bookmark page. I thought about using roboSpice, but it seems more appropriate to use 3 fragments and a main activity (where the download would be made) instead of 3 activities.
So i went to actionBarSherlock, but then, another problem came up. I need a header with 2 buttons and a title. One button would call bookmark page and the other button would call settings.
It doesn't seem right to use actionBarSherlock to create a header by modifying the title, or even removing it, and just use the tabs.
Any ideas of how to implement this?
Examples would be nice!
Searching around i found a way to implement this using broadcast receiver and not using fragments, only activities.
All i do is call a service in activity A, which opens my asyncTask to download the content and it broadcasts the result with the progress to activity B. Then, in activity B, i seek which view should show a progress bar and update the progress.
I used this comment as a guide to my implementation.
I've recently started developing Android Apps, and whilst the model is making more sense the more I look at it, I cannot do something (nor find any reference material on it) which to me seems quite simple.
I have an activity which has five buttons along the bottom, and a blank View taking up the rest of the screen. I want, upon clicking these buttons, for an activity to be opened in (and confined to) this view. I can get a new activity running without incident, but this opens in a new screen.
If anyone can show me an easy way to launch a (sub/child?) activity within a view which is defined in the parent activity's layout xml file - equally, it could be created in the parent activity - you'd really be doing me a favor!
I'd recommend taking a look at TabHost. The tabhost is an Activity itself, and the sub-views are all Actvities as well.
Here is a good tutorial that'll get you going very quickly. There is a more work to create (optional) icons for the tabs (also describe in the tutorial).
Hope this helps.
Edit* You mentioned buttons being at the bottom of the screen. Take a look at this SO Question
You can achieve that by using an ActivityGroup... here is a simple example which shows how to do it using a TabActivity:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100816175634/http://blog.henriklarsentoft.com/2010/07/android-tabactivity-nested-activities/
Of course, you will have to change the code since you are not using TabActivities. Just take a look at the getLocalActivityManager and getDecorView methods that is what you will be using.
This question actually has two parts.
The first part:
I've been developing my first app for a couple of weeks now. I have 5 screens and everything seems well. However, I'm considering changing the app's navigation to a TabView.
I haven't delved much into it, but I'm hoping someone can save me a little bit of time. It seems that people don't generally place Activities inside each tab. They simply point the tab content to a View. This is where my major setbacks are. 1) I already have Activity classes full of code and 2) I can't quickly guess how the structure of an app using TabView looks. For example, where do I put the handler code for clicking a button on a View? Does it all just get dumped into the TabView Activity somehow?
What I would like is if you could please give me a quick synopsis of what I'm looking at doing, answers to any questions you think I may have, and point me toward some resources for creating TabView applications. A quick Google search really just shows me how to create a TabView Activity and add a couple tabs to it. The code doesn't go any deeper. For example, say I have a layout xml to show in one of my tab's content pane, where does the code go for clicking a button I have in that layout?
The second part:
I've added a TabActivity to wrap the Activities I currently have in. At the moment I have Activities populating the content of my tabs (though ultimately I'd like to do this in the most efficient fashion, which doesn't seem to be having Activities be tab content). I've noticed something rather annoying. My MAIN Activity is an Activity I wrote for my user to log in to their account. After logging in, they are taken to my Tab Activity. Here is what happens:
When I am on my Tab Activity and I "minimize" the app by clicking the Home button and then launch it again, I don't get taken back to the Tab Activity. I get taken to my log in Activity. Why? I don't have the launchMode of my Tab Activity set to singleInstance... or is it singleInstance by default? How can I make the app re-launch showing the Tab Activity (ideally by setting some parameter, assuming I'm doing something wrong, and not having to save this data off somewhere and reading it and programmatically telling it what to go to)?
Thank you for all your time and help
I don't have a comment on the advisability avoiding the use of sub-activities in TabActivity. As for handlers -- if you aren't going to embed views instead of activities, then all the android:onclick type handler settings in your layout XML will call methods on the TabActivity. This is because they go to methods on the views' Context, which is the generally the nearest containing Activity. If you want to split your code up further without using Activities, I believe you'll have to use findViewById calls on the tab content views after you've set them up, and bind the handlers manually from there in your code.
I was in the midsts of tinkering in android with the goal of trying to make this small exploration game. I actually got pretty far so far: a nice sprite system, a title screen with a main menu that is all in game code (no UI buttons or anything) that launch various activities. An activity that loads this cool map view, that when clicked on will load up another view of a more detailed "zoomed in" action part of a map. It all works pretty well but now I am left wondering how well I am going about this.
(What happens to a view when you instantiate and then move the set the context to a new view? I am guessing as long as the activity is alive all the instantiations of various views that an activity uses are still good? And in an activities onPause is when id have to save the data thats changed in these views to persist the state in the event the user quits the game etc.. ?)
I have three menu options at the start of the game. The main one is:
New Game
The new game, I launch my main map
activity that can launch three views:
First two are a loading screen for
the second, a map screen.
Third view is a more detailed action
orientated part that uses this sprite
engine I developed.
It all works pretty good as in the map view you click on a cell it tells the Calling Activity through a listener to start the detailed action view, and passes in the ID of the cell (so it knows what objects to load in the detailed view based on the cell clicked in second view). (This took me awhile to figure out but someone helped here on another question to get this.) Reference that helped me on this part here. I also used the various information here on ViewSwitcher.
I got even a yes no dialog box in the second view that asks if they really wanna goto that cell when they click on it, a yes tells the calling activity to set the new view. What helped me to get this working was this reference here. I also had to fiddle with the calls to getContext and that, I am still not 100% sure what getResources and getContext do for me.
So is it bad practice to call and load a dialog from a view? If it is, then I don't understand how if I have an event in the view that needs to pop up a dialog how I do that? Call back to the activity and let the activity handle it the dialog response and then call a method on the view for the response?
So far all this works great, I did have a bit to learn about threads too. I spawn a different thread for my MenuView (handles the detection of button clicks and responses), my CellMap view which handles the cool big map that users can click on to see the indepth view which is my SystemView view.
So basically the activity call list is like this:
Home.Activity -> ScrollMap.activity which listens to CellMap wher ethe Yes/No dialog apperas (in the view of CellMap) and if the answer is yes to the question, then the onTouchEvent starts up the SystemView view using
private CellMap.MapClickedListener onTouchEvent=
new CellMap.MapClickedListener() {
#Override
public void onMapClick(int id) {
setContentView(new SolarSystem(theContext,id));
}
};
To help anyone else, that listener had to be defined in my CellMap class. Then in the ScrollMap activity when I am about to start the CellMap I just call a method to CellMap sets the map click listener. So far this is the only way I have been able to get data from a dialog (in this case a it was clicked so set the new view) back to the calling activity. Is this proper practice?
Now my biggest question is, I have a playerObject class I want to initialize on new game event (I know how to detect that push) and that then is available to any view in any activity for the life time of the cycle. So far the game activity has just two (3 if you count the loading progress bar) views. I want to get the players name, is that another activity or view? I cannot find a decent tutorial of just how to make a simple input dialogg box that would return a string.
How do i go about passing this stuff around? After I get the players name from wherever that edit box is to be loaded, I want to set the players name in the class and pass that class instance off to another view or activity so they may get at that data. Everything I have searched on this seemed like overkill or not the right way. Whats the best way to pass this "playerClass" around so that I can access it from other views (to say display the players name in every view).
I also have my Home Activity that waits for an onClick on 3 buttons, it then launches their activity that shows the view. I realize a continue game and new game are the same activity and will just change in data loaded off the drive to restore a save game. When the new game button is clicked I would love to get the players name they want to use and of course set the member of the playerClass to this name so it persists.
Where do I call (an edit dialog is it?) the edit dialog from? (more over how do I build one that can take an okay button and input from keyboard etc). Id also like to make it pretty, maybe I could have a simple view that has one edit box in it and a nice image background (though I haven't figured out how to place the edit boxes to fit nicely matching a background i draw for it. I guess id like an edit dialog I can skin to look how i want it to and fit the look of the game).
I am actually kinda happy what I got so far its looking not to bad, just not sure about some specifics like getting user input for a name of the player. Storing that information and passing it then to other activities and views.
Is it better to have one GameMain activity, and a ton of views:
Map view
Character sheet view
inventory view etc etc?
Or Should there be diff activities in there somewhere as well?
You've written a lot here, so I'm go gonna go ahead and answer the questions I think you're asking.
First, how can one share information between activities and views? If you're just sharing it between views in a single activity, store it in the instance of the Activity subclass.
Sharing between activities requires a little bit more. Instead of using an instance of the default Application class, you can create a subclass of Application and use that instead. Put your data in fields of that subclass. To tell your app to use your subclass, modify the app manifest like so:
<application
....
android:name=".YourAppClassNameHere">
....
</application>
As for getting user input, the simple answer is use the built-in EditText view. since you seem to want to give your game a more "custom" style, though, you may need to go about creating your own editable textbox. That and buttons should allow for most sorts of basic user input.
Now, good practice vis-a-vis activities and views. I'm not aware of a standard for this, but when designing I generally try to think of activities as more conceptually separate elements, whereas views are conceptually interwoven. the line between the two is dependent, in part, on the scope of the app; an app with a narrow focus can afford to break more actions down into different activities than can one with a much broader focus.
Your "GameMain" example is a bit on the fence, but I think you've made the right choice: the activity is "playing the game," as opposed to a menu or high-scores table, and the views present different aspects of the game being played.