I would like to put fairly extensive help information within my app - both "how to use" and explanation of what one is seeing.
The app (map oriented) has a row of buttons at the bottom, and I was considering adding a help button.
Context sensitive help is mostly not appropriate, btw.
What are common and best practices for this?
Thanks
I wouldn't suggest using a help button, once the user knows how to use your app it will be useless, and will only takes some space.
What I do (but it's maybe not the best practice) is to show a popup on the first use. Within the popup I put some basic help and a link to my website which fully explains how my app works (with some screenshots to make it user-friendly). I also put a "Help" button in the activity menu which redirects to my website again.
What I can suggest is to explore by yourself how other android apps shows the help information, and reuse or adapt the one you prefer (this is what I've done).
I have put help into a menu item as I expect new users to click the menu button anyway (my app, Zwitscher also has a button bar at the bottom).
Clicking the menu item then starts an Activity that simply shows a table view that explains the various buttons in the system and contains a link to more information online.
See https://github.com/pilhuhn/ZwitscherA/blob/master/src/de/bsd/zwitscher/HelpActivity.java and
https://github.com/pilhuhn/ZwitscherA/blob/master/res/layout/help.xml
Another option I've seen sometimes is including a help option in the preferences/configuration screen.
Usually it starts a new activity with a sequence of steps to make the user understand everything.
Related
I am re-pharsing my question to avoid negative points. I am aware of web view, dialogs, popups, notifications. if you have some other ideas please let me know.
I am working on a very big android application, in which I have to add some popup kind of thing, which tells the user what we have updated for this version. Kind of like, what bugs are fixed or whats new things are added.
The window have to be populated once or twice and it have to have user interactions, like click on the link, or contact us, or click on the image to go to some page inside the app. Please let me know any good ideas.
You definitively should give a look to the AlertDialog class
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlertDialog.html
This is basically the class used to display a message and get the ok/cancel/anything answer from the user. But it's customizable and you can make more or less what you want according to which button is pressed by the user.
This is more of a curiosity than anything else but it would be good to get some feedback from everyone on possible problems and solutions etc.
Is it possible to use one "host" activity and use that activity to display 3-4 different activities?
I already use tab host in my app and this doesn't seem to fit my needs in regard to the menu idea, ill explain what I'm trying to do as it may help.
Im trying to find a nice clean solution to playing background music, but this could be applied to other functions as well, but essentially, after the splash screen i would like a "host" activity to load first and in that activity, load up a menu activity, when the use presses a button the menu activity, i would like the next activity to load up still inside the "host" activity.
I'm hoping this would make playing music etc as clean as possible and with as little extra coding as possible.
Is this idea possible? would it be beneficial? what would be the best way to accomplish this?
Like i said this is more of a curiousity than a "gimme code to do it", I can work that out once i know the direction to head in & if its possible, I mainly want this for b/g music at the moment but im sure this could be applied other functions.
Thanks for looking, reading giving your thoughts :)
phil
Small question, but I think it is an interresting one as I haven't found the answer yet:
what is being used in the Youtube app to be able to swipe the fragment(?) to the right and showing the options behind it. You can do it on the main page and then your personal settings are being displayed.
Anyone have an idea how this is done? I saw it in one other (none-google) app too...
To get similar effect in app you can use ViewPager.
Some information and code examples: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/08/horizontal-view-swiping-with-viewpager.html
I have seen couple of Android applications when I came across one common practice. Navigation header does not have a Back button. Since then I was quite confused so as to place the same in the Navigation header of my application.
Should back button be placed in Navigation (Header) or we should leave keys to handle it? What is the best practice we should follow?
Thanks
My personal view is that each platform has its own way of handling certain functions. An apple device will have a back button on its navigation bar because that is the place where an iphone user will look for it.
As far as Android is concerned, because we are supplied with a physical back button, we must leave it at that because that is the first place an android user will look to if he wants to go back.
Therefore since user satisfaction and ease of use is the main concern, i would not play with the back button (unless i have to).
Similar to the responses above, however for the sake of simplicity I have taken a central approach in which I actually keep a back button in the navigation header however user can still press the hard key back button and the code actually performs the same functionality.
Essentially what it does is to cover both set of users, some really new ones who do not understand Android hard-keys yet, like people used to iOS (pun intended) and the other more suave Android users.
oI believe there could not be best approach. It depends on your custom UI and how much screen estate your navigation consume. The best approach is to buil two variants ant alllow to beta-testers decide.
Allthow back button on the screen could be as much handy, so much annoying.
What the "Back" button actually does, is to close your current activity and bring the previous one to the front.
You can do the same by calling finish() in your current activity. It will remove the current activity from activity Stack and take you to the previous one.
Asaf Pinhassi
i asked so many question regarding my title but i could not get my proper answer till yet.I need to implement androd's menu feature in my application ie when we goes to gallery in android phone, when we press menu than it comes with lots of option like share...etc.My question is can i implement same menu feature in my application? It is possible or not?
Thanks
To implement a "Share" feature, all you need to do is use createChooser() and an ACTION_SEND Intent.
Here is a blog post covering the technique.
If I am understanding your question you want to know if you can duplicate the feature of tapping on the menu button on the phone and having it pull up an options menu that you can then share via, gmail or some other posting medium?
If this is correct then I would have to say I would assume that you could duplicate this feature.
In short YES!
If you are wondering how you are to do this then I would start at here http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/menus.html
Droidnova .com (I posted it like this because as a new user I can only post one link) also has a good little how to on menu's.
I would also like to add that this is my first time posting on stackoverflow so please let me know if this was a good post or what I should do next time.
Thanks,
Bactos