I have an activity here.
I want to click a button and then hide the activity GUI.
That is, GUI is needed and you can hide it by clicking a "Hide App" button. How can i
implement this "Hide App"?
Somebody help! Thanks in advance!
To do what you want within the organizational model of android, your "program" should be written as a service, not an activity. You would then have a gui that is an activity and a client of your service, which can be started (made visible) and paused/stopped (hidden) as desired.
Presumably when your user clicks the hide application button, you're going to want to show something - at the very least a show button, so the user isn't stuck without input options!
So what you really have then is two views, one with the GUI hidden.
Two approaches I can see:
Hide app calls another activity with only the UI shown that you want. When the activity is finished, use Activity.finish() to return to the original activity with the GUI
Look at ViewAnimator and its subclasses (ViewFlipper and ViewSwitcher)
You could also just enable the screen lock. ;-)
That would automatically lock the screen (hide your app). And when the user unlocked the screen (using the UI and a gesture the user is already very familiar with) he would automatically get back into your app without you needing to do any extra coding.
The additional advantage of the screen lock is that it can be be password-protected, so if the user has his screen-lock already set to a password, instead of a slide bar -- he would just get the slide password thingy.
Related
I have a activity themed like a dialog and I have it setup so that it finishes when the user click outside.
this.setFinishOnTouchOutside(true);
As expected when the user clicks outside, it finishes. The activity is marked as floating activity and is only shown on top of the phone.
Now, if the user click on any other part of screen like the phone button/contact button on home screen, then the activity gets finished, but the user has to click on phone/contact app icon again to open phone/conatct app.
What I want is that if user click outside my activity, then the action must be performed as if the activity is not at all present on screen. Something like notification, which does not prevent user from doing other other tasks.
The only way you might be able to do this is by using a hidden WindowManager.LayoutParams flag, FLAG_SLIPPERY.
This allows touches starting on your View to continue to whatever View is below when the touch leaves your View but remains on the screen. However, I don't think this will work.
Android prevents you from touching "through" a touchable Window because it assumes that Window should be receiving the TouchEvent. Android also prevents you from programmatically "touching" the screen (without root or system access), most likely for security reasons.
I dug through AOSP for a while and found this.
Reading the comments, it's possible to infer that, while what you see doesn't take up the whole screen, the Activity's Window does. So, while nothing in your Activity is clicked, the Window is still overlaying everything, just with a transparent background, and is dealing with the touches that aren't passed to your Activity's UI. This brings us back to the "touching through" issue.
I've been trying to lock the navigation bar on Android for 3 weeks so that the user can't send my activity to background. I need to do this to get my lock screen app more secure (I know that writing a custom lock screen is not the best idea but it's a requirement).
I've tried immersive mode, system dialogs, flags on decor view, onKeyDown, onBackPressed (this one works for the back button), reorder_tasks and moving my task to the front (this only works when I click on recent apps) and the usage API.
I've found this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wow.keypad.lock.screen which does EXACTLY what I need to do but I don't know how they did it.
Could anyone please help me?
I need a permanent solution like the one these guys from WOW have done.
Thanks!!!
How To Hide Navigation Bar Permanently In Android Activity
It looks like something like this has already been tackled. Your main task would not be to lock the nav bar, as much as just hide it so that the user cannot access it.
I'm working on a lockscreen widget(not trying to be specific here, but Nexus 7 ) . The widget has a button which would trigger an activity.When the user clicks the button, the unlock slide symbol get's highlighted hinting the user has to slide-unlock his screen before he wants to see the button's activity. Since now, the device is locked,is there a way to bypass this and just display the activity on top of the lock screen? (not in the case of pin/pattern obviously, but only just slide)
Was searching a lot for a way to do it. We need to use flags in while giving an intent to the widget button. More information here.
Android Lock Screen Widget
I was wondering, since on Android one closes a screen by pressing the "return" round-arrow, is it still OK to have a cancel button on each screen or does it look rather clumpsy and confuse because the user might think it does something different than the return button.
Is there a good rule or even guideline for this ?
Many thanks
On each screen it's from my point of view useless, you are suppose to go to your previous screen (previous Activity since one screen is one Activity... usually) with the back button. For dismissing an AlertDialog, keyboard, ProgressDialog : back button is still ok. Where a cancel button can be added is when the user is processing a complex chain of action and in the middle of it he thinks : screw this... here a cancel button which bring him back to your home Activity is welcome.
Downloading lots of app and look at their application's flow (navigation between screens) will teach you what's intuitive, natural and what's not.
Personal thoughts.
I created an Activity which allows navigating between pages with a couple of Buttons (Previous and Next). When the user clicks one of the buttons, the Activity (same) needs to be "refreshed". In order to do this, I set up the buttons to make a call to
onCreate(this);
after they set up the other stuff that the activity uses for the paging to work.
And it is working so far, but I'm wondering if there is a better way. Is there?
You should rethink your approach. Having Previous and Next buttons looks like an iphone's NavigationBar View. Remember that in android you have the back button, so a previous button shouldn't be necessary.
If you wish to do it, check Android's Activity Lifecycle. You should update your Activity on the onStart() method and avoid the call to onCreate(this) which doesn't sound good.
The activity displays data related to a certain day. The navigation allows choosing the day which is being displayed. As such, clicking one of the buttons changes the information which is displayed.
Example:
When the Activity first loads, it shows a given day - let's say August 23rd. Then when the user clicks the activity's "Previous" Button, the Activity shows August 22nd.
Then the user clicks the "Next" button and the Activity shows August 23rd again. If the user clicks the "Next" button again, the Activity will show August 24th.
Doesn't it seam a little strange to only have a "Next" (and rely on the physical "Back" button) ?
Thanks.
I fixed this trough refactoring:
Created a new function with the code that was being executed in onCreate (i.e. Layout initialization, database access and information display). The new function is called by the onCreate method (when the Activity gets the "Create" notification) and at anytime that I need to "refresh" the contents of the Activity (i.e. when a button is pressed).
Thanks for your comments.