I do have a problem and have very little to go on. I'm about to release an App (created with Air for Android As3) on the Samsung App Store and just got a list of issues that have to be resolved after the app has been tested by samsung staff before the app could be released.
I did manage to solve almost all of the issues, but 1 very important one is beyond me. They say the screen turns/stays black, when returning after the device alarm interrupted the app. This issue practivally happend on all their devices, including a group including the phones I own (e.g. Galaxy S3).
I do have "OnDeActivate" and "OnActivate" listeners in place that are there to pause the app, disable sound etc. if it loses focus, gets minimized etc., yet I checked on my devices and I can't reproduce this error. Meaning if the app gets interrupted on my device by the alarm, I can resume it without any problems. no black screens.
So the question is: Is there any way for me to fix that at all? I do have to work within AirForAndroid AS3 so I guess possibilities are limited. Any clues where I can look? Any listeners to set, or is there a way to maybe "force" the app to reinitialize or refresh the display? Or to listen for the system alarm? Help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I am trying to overcome the same issue, I read somewhere that setting the stage quality to something else on both the activate and deactivate events might solve the issue.
So just set your stage quality to medium or whatever different in the deactivate and set it back to what it needs to be in the activate.
This should make AIR snap out of that black screen for the alarm (I hope)
An app of mine is with this fix is currently undergoing testing on the Samsung App Store.
I hope it fixes it.
Good news, the dirty fix of toggling the stage quality seems to have worked for Samsung, it has not shown up in their latest certification report of my app.
by the way, this is not for a stage3D app, that's different
It's for a GPU app
When the app loses focus on Android (goes into background) it will lose the context, which among other things mean that you lose all the created graphics, cached objects and like.
You didn't specify what kind of app it is. If you're using Stage3D, that means you'll have to recreate all your textures, and if you're on plain old displaylist, you'll have to recreate any bitmaps that were created at runtime, and redraw your screen at least once (so the vector graphics get redrawn too).
Now, if you're using Starling, for example, it can take care of recreating context for you (there's a flag for enabling that), although you'll still have to recreate dynamically created bitmaps.
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I'm looking for a reliable way to let the Android user show a web site on the lock screen.
This could be done in principle in 3 ways:
Showing it on the native Android lock screen, but then they should be able to remove the native clock because my site is a world clock (you can see it at intelnav.50webs.com/world_time.html if you're interested). For all I know this can't be done.
Using a 3rd party custom lock screen that allows this. Unfortunately I couldn't find a good one, and I did some searching.
Writing a custom lock screen myself.
There are some suggestions and even sample projects for doing this, even some questions here on StackOverflow. But I'm not sure how reliable they are. There is no standard way of doing it, from what I found, since lock screen widgets were removed. But the proposed ways of building custom lock screens don't seem very reliable to me, from what I could judge from the comments I could find. So, one of my questions (sorry but the problem is somewhat complex), does anybody know of a sample project for a custom lock screen that actually has an app built by it and offered on Google Play and which actually works well on a wide range of devices ?
Could anybody help me with a suggestion for a reliable way to do what I want? Along the lines above?
Looks like I'm going to answer my own question. I'm not sure how many will be interested but you can never know.
Update sep 18: Now there is a short answer that wasn't available a year ago when I first answered it. Namely, my own WebLock app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simionescu.vlad.weblock
Below is my original answer that gives a general idea of how this can be done programmatically.
So I went into digging and looks like it can be done. It wasn't even as difficult as I feared it would be, though I wouldn't say it was very easy either.
The main points are as follows:
I wrote an app that basically puts the site on the native Android lock screen. (Actually, I already had an app and I added this functionality to it, but that's less important. The main thing is that my method requires writing an app.)
So I guess this falls somewhere between the cases 1 and 3 above. I do need an app, but it's not a full-fledged custom lock screen, as detailed below.
This of course means that the method is more general, it works with any app, not just for displaying a site.
Set FLAG_SHOW_WHEN_LOCKED for the Activity window, as shown for instance here:
How to make our own lock screen in android instead of default lock screen
But I only used this flag, the other 3 mentioned in the link I didn't need.
Launch the Activity (if it's not running already) and set it on top before the device screen goes off, that is on receipt of the ACTION_SCREEN_OFF event. This way, the app is always visible when the screen goes off so next time it starts, Android will put it in front of the lock screen. (At least if it's the standard one; from the documentation it looks like it should be working with a custom lock screen too but I didn't test it. I guess it depends on how that custom lock screen is written. Anyway, I don't necessarily want my site on a custom lock screen, if the user has one he probably won't want to see my site in front of it).
This also means that the site will appear in front if the device is switched off then on, even if it's not locked. Which is what I intended.
Automatically start the app at startup via the BOOT_COMPLETED event
Capture the standard back key (which is allowed, unlike for the home key) and make it act like the home key when it would otherwise terminate the app.
I intentionally let the home key act normally. This of course means that after pressing it (which is the way the user exits the app and enters the device) the lock screen underneath is shown. Otherwise I would have had to deal myself with password-protecting the device, which is in no way something I want to do. There are a few drawbacks with this approach but IMO they're small. For simplicity's sake I chose to do it like this.
Besides, this way my app remains reliable, which it wouldn't have if I had hijacked the home key, no matter which way.
As said, this means that this is no full-fledged custom lock screen, just a way of putting the site over the default lock screen.
(update nov. 18) There's one more important point. As described so far, such an app could have a security issue. I'm not an expert so I'm not sure if it really does, and if so how important it is, but you can never be too safe. If the user can go unchecked to any site, when on the lock screen, it means that if the phone is lost and a bad guy finds it, he could go to a site that has dangerous code that could unlock the device. I'm not sure if it really could be done but I wouldn't be surprised. So, one good advice for anybody who writes such an app would be to severely (but reasonably) restrict Web navigation while on the lock screen.
These are the main points, there are a few other implementation details but I'll leave them out for the moment.
All this looks pretty standard and reliable to me, given that it's all in the official Android documentation.
I tested it on my KitKat device, plus on 2 emulators, one also with KitKat on it, the other one with the latest and greatest. Everything seems to work fine. Including the case when the device / emulator is password protected.
So I just wrote the app and published it on Google play. It's here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.a50webs.intelnav.worldtime
Which means that now there is at least an app on Google Play which has this feature. It remains to be seen how well it will behave. I'll probably have to make minor corrections in the coming weeks, but other than that it should be fine.
Also in the coming weeks, maybe a month or so, I plan to put another app that will do this generally with any site, at the user's request.
(update nov. 18) I finally wrote the app and put it on Google play. It took a little longer than planned but it's ready. It's here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simionescu.vlad.weblock&hl=en
As noted above, when on the lock screen, navigation is restricted to the same domain, so that if a bad guy finds the phone he cannot go to some malware site and unlock it.
First off, this has never happened before on any other android device I've used (multiple devices have been tried and tested before this).
Now I have an app that I have worked on for a little over a year now, it is called AutomatedId (on the app store) and it has worked quite well for my company for quite some time.
Recently I have been given a device to add compatibility to the app (specifically for reading UHF tags) but that isn't the problem.
The problem comes whenever you open the app, the screen stops reading inputs completely, as well as buttons cease to function. I turned on developer options to see the screen inputs and as i suspected, it completely stops and does not read any of the inputs after the app is opened. Clicks don't work, buttons don't work, keyboard doesn't open, hardware buttons on the device stop working. It's a mess, does anyone know what could have caused this?
This is a S98 from here: http://www.wepoy.com/product_view_18.html
moved my comment to the answer as you said. This may be due to memory leak. Here are some references that may help you fix them: Fixing-Memory-Leaks-in-Android-Studio & use this library from square to detect memory leaks early: leakcanary
Is it possible like in topic, I mean start camera intent and before opening that view set screen not to see rotating screen effectc? I was trying to use overridePendingTransition after startingActivityForResult, I tried also to put this overriDePendingTransition while calling onPause and OnResume. Somehow camera uses own animation. I would like to disable that animation. Is is possible? This effect doesn't affect in android 2.3.x. Does it might have connection with touchWiz?
TL:DR
As of KitKat 4.4.2 this still does not seem possible. Tested with AOSP phone app, Nexus 5 experience Phone App, Maps, AOSP Browser and Chrome.
(I would have put this in a comment, not enough rep yet. It's still an answer per-say, though not a solution to the problem)
Only thing I can say about why it's not possible is:
If you could force a transaction on the "external" intent through
your own app code, you would be basically injecting your animation
into another publisher's app, which would be a MAJOR design flaw
in the Android framework.
My guess is this will never be possible unless the OS manages such transactions in a bullet-proof way to both ends. Some AOSP branded-builds and custom Launchers can change default animations for ALL activity starts/resumes though (or even use no animations at all).
We’re porting to Android some interactive iOS apps used to teach young children with learning disabilities. We have hit a major usability issue, because we can't figure out how to disable physical or on-screen navigation buttons (Home and Recent Apps).
Before anyone says “you don’t want to do that”, we fully understand why you would always want these buttons enabled for an able-bodied adult, but these children pose a unique set of accessibility issues. Specifically:
Their fine motor control may be poor - they may inadvertently touch a different area of the screen to the area they intend, or accidentally use more than one finger at once.
They may have weak muscle tone and poor physical strength – so e.g. the bottom of the palm of their hand may drop and touch the screen while trying to just use a finger.
They struggle to achieve and easily become disheartened or disruptive if they fail.
For instance, a typical 5 year old child with Down syndrome will accidentally drop out of the app they are using as a result of inadvertently touching the Home button: when this happens repeatedly, and the adult teacher or parent has to go back into the app for them repeatedly, the child loses interest and focus. Another typical scenario is a young child with Autism, who may freak out completely and need physically restraining if this happens while using their favourite app. Also, many disabled children will try to poke any other button they can find, in search of a response. In any of these situations, a potentially valuable educational session may have to be completely abandoned.
We're aware of SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_HIDE_NAVIGATION and SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LOW_PROFILE, but these only reduce the visibility of the on-screen buttons until the child touches some other part of the screen, and then they re-appear in a way that’s more distracting than if they were visible all the time.
On iOS there is the “Guided Access” feature that solves this problem trivially. Can we emulate anything similar on Android?
On iOS there is the “Guided Access” feature that solves this problem trivially.
Guided access appears to be a device setting, not something that developers enable unilaterally themselves, thank heavens.
Can we emulate anything similar on Android?
There is no similar device setting in stock Android.
You can download the Android source code, modify it as you see fit, build the results into a ROM mod, and install that ROM mod on devices as you see fit.
Or, you can perhaps work with a device manufacturer creating tablets aimed at children to see if either they have already added this capability to their devices, or would be willing to work with you to add such a capability in a future iteration of their devices.
I'm writing a game for Android and am laying out the playing screen myself, handling both vertical and horizontal orientations, and haven't done anything if the width and height are the same.
Does anybody know of at least one Android device that has a perfectly square screen resolution?
The MotoACTV is 220x176 (not square but close), the WIMM One is 160x160 (square).
The MotoACTV has been rooted, but the default device runs a customized Android. It's a pretty cool device, though. The WIMM is slick and runs a more-standard Android.
None the I'm aware of. Every device I'm familiar with has a distinctive "portrait" vs "landscape" mode.
It would probably be wise to make sure your code can always gracefully handle portrait vs landscape - even if you ever happen to run across a square device.
Conversely, if you want a square - just "crop" the image appropriately. The cropping, of course, will become "zero" if you ever encounter this hypothetical "square screen". :)
This is a rather late answer to this question, but things have changed somewhat since then, and although there are still no mainstream Android devices with square screens, there are 3 square BlackBerry devices (Q10, Q5, and Passport) that can run Android apps, and so would fall under that criteria. Interestingly, when an app is run on a square BlackBerry Passport, and the device is rotated to its side, the app also rotates, however none of the onPause(), onStop(), or onDestroy() events are called, and so the activity is not destroyed and re-created, but the current activity layout is re-used. So, in that respect, nothing happens, and you don't have to worry about saving/loading resources and such.
This behaviour is actually built-in in Android -- it will only destroy and re-create an activity, if the screen dimensions change. The API docs don't talk about this edge case, as there are no square Android devices, but you can see that the reason for destroying and re-creating the activity during orientation change is to load alternative resources specific for the new orientation. Since rotating a square device doesn't change the screen dimensions, there is no need to load alternative resources, and therefore, there's no need to destory and re-create an activity. I hope that helps.
I believe the WIMM ONE is the only square screen Android device out there. It has capacitive touch display at 160x160.
Yes, the Motorola Flipout is one.