I'm writing an application that should both have the ability to place widgets on the home screen, and to show these widgets in the application itself. I figure that the best way to do this is through the use of an AppWidgetHost for the application part.
I've been looking around, but I cannot find any good examples on how to write AppWidgetHosts. Have any of you done this, and are willing to share? Or do you know of any tutorials that I've missed?
Not exactly a tutorial but here is an older forum post.
The code is part of the mylock project, which you also might find useful if you dig.
Related
I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
So these days I've been busy to get more into the Android Design guidelines and to learn more about it and how to implement it in my future applications. This is the main website I use to see what the guidelines are: http://developer.android.com/design/index.html. Great website but there are a few small things I just can't find in the dev guide or somewhere else. I just don't know how to implement some (simple) UI elements.
Can someone provide me code snippets of the following questions? (I want to know how to do it as simple as possible, how Google ment it!) It can help other (starting) developers too!
My main question is, are there special elements to achieve these things? As they are the key element in Android 4.0 it should have this things as some standard right?
1) Android 4.0 is using titles with dividers a lot in there new theme and it's looking great. But I can't find how to do implement this element simple like it should. What I want to know is how to make this blue title text with the grey looking divider underneath it look at this picture:
2) How to make section dividers in general? Like this image:
3) How to make a list with section dividers and give a list-item a 2-line explanation under it's name like this:
I did search the internet to find an answer to my questions but there are no websites that did help me, so I hope someone can! Thank you in advance and have a nice day :-)
In most cases how you are going to have to do it is create a custom layout. I tried recreating the look of the people application this way. for the most part the look you are going for is similar to the PreferenceActivityview. That gives you the look of the last image and probably how it was done in the People application with some extra programming. I just found it easier to create my own layout though instead of trying to mess around with that.
To my knowledge there is nothing in the api to create what you are looking to do easily and custom layout are going to be the way to go.
the custom dialog layout like you show in the beginning is very simple to do so if you dont know how to do manipulate layouts I would start there. look up the android color swatches to get the color of that blue
Edit
another thing you could do is look through the People source code and see how they did it but it will probably be more of a pain than what its worth when you can just do a layout
I'm looking at APIs and have absolutely no idea how to create and show the PopupWindow. Why are the APIs are written in such a way that people need to search for other resources in order to understand how to use a particular thing?
Well, anyway, can you please describe how can I create and show PopupWindow? Thanks a lot.
The point of the APIs is to provide technical documentation. Their primary purpose is as a reference material, not as a learning tool. That said you can learn a lot from reading them. In general I find that googleing for tutorial tends to get me started in the right direction. There are lots of examples of PopupWindows in android, check out this StackOverflow post: Is there a simple example of the PopupWindow class using Android v2.0?
This is a UI element that I have seen a lot lately (in the NY Times app and Grooveshark App) and I want to learn how to implement it but I can't find a guide. Does anyone know of a tutorial or guide for implementing such a thing or are these custom implementations?
if you lack the possibility to make a slidingdrawer that can go from top to bottem or left to right i can recommand http://blog.sephiroth.it/2011/03/29/widget-slidingdrawer-top-to-bottom/
Check out http://code.google.com/p/android-misc-widgets/. Get the sourcecode with samples. Might maybe be what you are looking for. (Though it is only down->up afaik)
I discovered that there is a UI element in android called SlidingDrawer that does just this. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/SlidingDrawer.html
Ok so I am starting off with android development and I have found a bunch of useful tutorials so I am set there. What I am looking for is a resource that provides homework style problems to do and has the answers downloadable so I can check my solution against the "official" solution.
So for example instead of the notepad tutorial it would be: "Build an application that you can create, edit, delete notes, ...etc.". Ideally the "official" solution would have some explanation as to why they built it the way they did. (so a tutorial at the tail end)
Anyone know of any resources that provide their tutorials in this format?
Thanks.
Okay, here's one: build me an app that allows the user to make, modify, and store notes. The 'official' answer is the Notepad app in the 9th level of the api. (Note that this is different from the notepad tutorial).
The point is that asking questions is easy, the harder part is actually making a program that does the job. And #Roflecoptr is right, at this level it can be implemented very differently. But if you want that mindset, you can write your own 'homework' easily. Just think up a few things you want that are simple, build it, does it do what you want well? Then you pass.
Despite for very trivial problems I dont think this is possible, because there are way to much possible implementation possibilites so that you can't compare your solution to the "official" solution.
But why do you need something like that? If you want to learn to program on Android, you can just follow some tutorials you've already found and then modify them, adapt them to your needs. When you get more used to the development of Android apps you can just get some ideas on tutorials/android development sites and then implement your own solution. There is plenty of help available here on SO and on other development sites, which will help you if you really get stuck.
You could always go to the Android Samples page, and without looking at their implementations, do your own and compare. The samples page is here:
http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/index.html
I'm writing a new app for android and I would like to implement also a first launch tutorial. In particular, the tutorial has to be interactive. Basically, after a user registers to the service, a minimum settings will be required.
I'd like something like today we have into Google Apps, like Sheets, Docs and so far. The exception there is that those tutorials have the aim to explain how the app works. Here I want to have something where user can input some data.
I was looking at ShowcaseView but seems to be deprecated and old in style.
So here the question is: what is the best way to implement that? ViewPager?
I also had a look to this other question, but it did not help too much.
Any advice is really appreciated.
EDIT: I have found this other nice alternative. AppIntro It seems what I was looking for. :)
There are few I found by quick searching Github:
https://github.com/Seishin/showcaseview-android
https://github.com/worker8/TourGuide
https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView
I'm pretty sure you can find the right one for you ;)
You can do it in several ways that really depends on you and your app. Basically you can create a "Boarding" experience with ViewPager that will go thru the main screen of your app (with static images for example) where you explain the user what goes on in your app. The other way way is an interactive tutorial as the user already landed into your app - you can achieve this with something like Showcase (I'm pretty sure that there are libs on GitHub that are still maintained).
I would recommend Roman Nuriks Wizard Pager code on Github as a starting point. It's not so much a library as a sample code showing you how to do what you want.
The general approach is to use a ViewPager with some form of navigation buttons to move the user forwards and backwards through the pager Fragments.
https://github.com/romannurik/Android-WizardPager