How can I add shake functionality in my Android application? - android

I want to develop an application with some advance features like shake feature, orientation of images, zoom in/out, scrolling, etc. For instance, the
user can shake the phone in order to erase an entered text. Also, by rotating the phone
clockwise or anti-clockwise, the orientation of the underlying images will change.
How would I do that?

For shaking:
You will need to use the phone's accelerometer sensor. You can find many examples of this if you Google (for example: Android: I want to shake it)
For rotations:
When the phone detects an orientation change, Android will destroy and recreate your application. There are lifecycle methods (see http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html) that are called that allow you to save and restore your application's current state. Again, if you Google:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/runtime-changes.html
http://www.androidguys.com/2008/10/14/rotational-forceson-your-android-app/

Related

Android 9 Screen Rotation Approach

Our team has recently updated a system application (installed in priv-app) from Android 5 to Android 9. This seems to have broken the previously working (and relatively well documented approach) of programmatically flipping the device orientation.
We had been using this approach and it had worked at globablly flipping the device orientation 180 degrees:
Settings.System.putInt( context.getApplicationContext().getContentResolver(), Settings.System.USER_ROTATION, 2)
We check each time to make sure the accelerometer rotation is disabled also. The setting does in fact stick as when interrogate the settings provider and can see the value being updated, the screen is simply not reacting, even after a reboot etc..
I'm trying to understand if Android 9 introduced any further gotchas that can prevent a screen rotation from happening, would be grateful if anyone had any insight on this particular issue?
You can instead use Activity.setRequestedOrientation() if its a particular Activity your want to change. This can be set explicitly to portrait, reverse portrait, landscape, reverse landscape, etc... It will then lock to the orientation you set. You can use the various sensor values if you want it to be flexible for the user.
If you want to know what your current orientation is (including reverse orientations) it can be complicated but I just answered my own question here about how to do it - Android sensor orientation problems with edge-to-edge insets
If you want to change the system rotation
You need to ensure ACCELEROMETER_ROTATION is off and then the value you use needs to come from the surface rotation constants (which are relative to your displays natural orientation) - https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/Surface#ROTATION_0
Another quick edit - any Activity can override this setting (including a launcher) for themselves. So it may be that whatever you are running is actually what changed to lock or allow certain orientations.

Phonegap: Is it possible to change orientation using javascript?

I was wondering if within Phonegap it was possible to disable orientation changes using JavaScript alone. So not using an external plugin, or modifying the config.xml for example. I could not find any definitive answers to this question. The reason for this is we have an application that we package up and have customers download, which allows them to run their own mobile applications using a software product we offer. Since we want customers to have all the options available for their applications, this packaged application has both orientations enabled (this application was built using Phonegap obviously).
I was thinking perhaps there is an event I can listen for and disable its propagation. Another hack I was thinking of was if I could detect an orientation event, I can rotate the page in the opposite direction of the movement that triggered the orientation event, if its not possible to disable its propagation or stop the rotation in the first place.

How to get device orientation

What is the best way to get the device orientation with cocos2d-x (c++)?
My Android/iOS application does support all 4 device orientations, and more important than knowing if it is landscape or portrait, I would like to know if it is upside down or not.
I will have to know from within a CCLayer.
UPDATE
I am trying to get events for right tilt and left tilt. To do so, I am calculating the angle at which the device is held. However, I need to know what orientation the device has, to be able to know if I am actually tilting left or right.
Though cocos2d-x is cross platform, few things are still very much platform dependent, for example, if you see the CCFileUtils, we have separate implementation files for iOS, Android etc, the cross platform is maintained with a single header,
Keeping that in mind,
In Android, you can get the device orientation by using the constants,
Surface.ROTATION_0 (no rotation)
Surface.ROTATION_90
Surface.ROTATION_180
Surface.ROTATION_270.
which you can get by calling Display.getRotation()
(It only rotate in all these directions if, android:screenOrientation:fullSensor is set)
And in iOS,
You can get the values with
UIDeviceOrientationPortrait
UIDeviceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown
UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft
UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeRight
(It only rotates in all these directions if, supportedInterfaceOrientations method returns UIInterfaceOrientationMaskAll)
Note:
Its not a good practice to rotate a phone upside down in portrait mode, only on tablets its accepted.. (Apple might even reject your app for this reason)
Let me know if you want to know how to use it, but googling the keywords will give you the usage..
After a quick google search :
http://www.cocos2d-x.org/wiki/Device_Orientation
http://www.cocos2d-x.org/forums/6/topics/36414
UDPDATE:
I don't think you can determine the orientation the way you want to from cocos2d-x.
Then the only solution that I'm thinking of is to go into java through jni and use android's methods to determine the current orientation. Here's a
link
on how to determine all 4 orientations.
As for how to call java methods from c++, that's another ball game.

Is it possible in Android to have the camera focus on a specific point in the preview?

I'm looking at the doc http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Camera.Parameters.html
and I'm not seeing anything that would allow me to make it possible for the user to tap on a specific point in the camera preview and have that become the point on which the camera would try to focus.
Is this simply missing? or am I overlooking how this can be done?
In Android 4.x, this is possible, with the setFocusAreas. You'll have to check getMaxNumFocusAreas first to see if this feature is supported on your device, and how many areas to use.
Then, you'll need to convert the user's touch coordinates to the coordinates used by the Camera.Area object (described here), and call setFocusAreas with the coordinates. From then on, calls to autoFocus will use that region for selecting focus.

Manually rotate screen

Hs there any chance to rotate the screen on Android programmatically for the whole system?
Background is that I'm using a CMPC-device which features a non-Android-supported rotation sensor, and as a quick fix, I'm planning to write a small app that changes orientation for the entire system.
Is there any function available for this purpose?
I couldn't find anything on the documentation :(
You can find what you want here :
http://www.anddev.org/rotate_screen_from_code_change_screen_orientation-t2687.html
App can't change orientation for entire system. I guess, you need to make custom build of Android for this purpose.

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