Do you have any idea what's the starting point to develop an UI for Android OS, similar with HTC SenseUI ?
Can I create that on top of Android or I need to get the Android source code ?
Thank you.
Florin Matincă
You'd need to modify the Android OS to some extent, but since Android is open source, that's not a problem.
The problem is getting it installed on phones - if you've noticed, the only companies that have custom UIs are also phone manufacturers, so they can just ship their phones with it installed. Also, if a new version of Android comes out, you'd need to get the new source, and modify most of it again.
Distribution would be a serious problem...
HTC Sense consist of a variety of functions.
Some like the Lock Screen can be implemented as normal programs. The start screen for programs can as well.
The systems setting for example can't be easily replaced without going into the android source code.
I have to disagree with xil3, there are some realy popular home screen replacements out there not restricted to a certain brand.
ADW.Launcher
LauncherPro
HelixLauncher
HelixLauncher2
All four are available on market place and therefor the distribution is simple.
HelixLauncher (and 2) are based on the Launcher from android itself, for which the sources are available as a git repository. This means you could use these sources to start your own Home Screen replacement.
So have fun!
Related
I'm new to android development and working on a project called Arithland ATM. Arithland is a competition and I want to make a real machine similar to ATM which work with the competition score instead of money. My question is how to program android tablet to run just specific app I made and people can't close the app and go inside the android and other parts of the tablet like setting or google apps or camera or ....
I know it is possible because I saw such tablets in H&M which is a clothes shopping and they used tablets for survey.
then I put the tablet inside a physical case and it becomes something similar to ATM. note that I don't want to use a core and monitor and keyboard and other hardware to make this, I just want to make it by android tablet because of some reasons.
EDIT:
I found this link very helpful: Set up Single-Purpose Devices
special thanks to #csm_dev
Look at Screen Pinning on Security in Settings.
I am going to create an app for devices with Android OS 2.1 and higher. As many developer I met layout problems and after reading about that in the official android documentation I decided to follow a way; I created 6 directory one for every screen density (ldpi,mdpi,hdpi,xhdpi,xxhdpi,xxxhdpi). What I want to know is if I did it right, I know that layout could be not exact at 100% but could I'll meet serious problems doing that?What I should do?
The second problem is checking app in many devices in the same time, I use Android Studio and I am able to create devices and use emulators but there is a plugin or a website or something else I can use to test quickly the app in tens of Android devices without set all manually?
Thanks in advance!
Simple question,
I make an application for my phone (android froyo).
Is it will run on android froyo tablet ?
Or I must make some modification to make it work on tablet ?
Simple answer: It may run on the tablet - try.
Not so simple answer: It depends on whether you use some features of the phone and whether those features are available in your tablet. For example, if your tablet does not have GPS and you are developing location aware applications, that obviously is not going to work. Another thing to take care of would be the usability of the application. Your UI would most probably be designed with the phone's form factor in mind. That may not look exactly appealing on a large screen device like the tablet.
So long as you use the appropriate <supports-screen> tags in your Manifest.xml file, yes. However, I'd strongly suggest you go about making a tablet UI, because users don't like phone UIs stretched on a tablet screen. This document might help you with that.
At #GDDDE i was sitting in a ignite talk by #creaseapp - a tiling window manager for Android. And since then I do not get the following question out of my head: "how to let x>1 APPs run on the same time" - #creaseapp solves the problem by just using WebAPPs - this is a easy to implement and working solution, but with native APP support we could have so much more use-cases.
Basically, what they want to achieve is to run multiple apps and show their output on one screen. For example, running 2 apps side by side - as it would be possible on any regular operating systems (e.g., text editor in one window, browser in another, but shown side by side). Is that possible?
No.
From what I know, this would require modifications to the Android system itself.
Substantial modifications, yes. This has been asked repeatedly over the years, and the answer has always been that this would be a Herculean task to add. Note that more operating systems are moving towards one-app-at-a-time models (OS X Lion, Ubuntu Unity).
seems that the time is now ripe:
https://github.com/Onskreen/cornerstone
thanks to Ronan Schwarz for the hint on G+
Recently myself and a small group of friends became interested in developing a game for a mobile platform. Originally we considered the iPhone but none of us use macs, so we decided Android would be a more realistic platform to use. Before we get started, I was hoping that I might find some answers to a couple questions so we don't waste our time if this project isn't feasible. Any help is appreciated!
I can't seem to find out how many programming languages Android supports. Java is obvious, but what about C+? It seems that Android supports C and C++ through Eclipse, but is that it? (I'm not the programmer for the project which is why I'm asking this. He's comfortable in C+).
Our game involves the use of two digital analog sticks (it's not a twin-stick shooter but it's a similar concept). It would seem that most Droid devices unfortunately don't use multi-touch though... Are there many devices out there right now which support this functionality and I'm just not seeing them, or should we possibly consider the development of a different game that would only use a single input?
Assuming there's no snags following those first two questions, what would you consider the best screen resolution to develop in? It seems like there are a variety of resolutions out there right now and we can't decide which is the best to use.
Again, any answers are appreciated!
You will have to use at least some Java, though you can call C++ with the newly released NDK.
To my knowledge at least the Droid and Nexus One support multitouch. Not sure about the newer ones.
I would develop for multiple screen sizes.
Chris Pruett did two very good presentations on writing real time games for android you may want to look into, they were a huge help for me.He also lightly touches on the NDK in the second one, linked below. I can only post one link since I'm a new member, but a google search for "writing real-time games for android" should turn it up.
http://bit.ly/checYY
1) Java is the language of the SDK. The majority of apps are and should be written in Java. The only reason for the NDK is for apps previously written in C++ that are to be ported to Android. There are downsides - it only supports compiling to 2 different CPUs (one is the Nexus one's CPU, can't remember what the other is). So if you do use C/C++ in the NDK, you are seriously limiting the number of devices you can ship to.
2) If you want to use dual analog sticks, why not display the sticks in the corners of the screen and allow the user to place their thumbs on them? You don't need hardware support.
3) Android SDK supports multiple screen resolutions so you don't necessarily need to worry about it immediately. I would aim for WVGA to start with (800x480 - Nexus One / HTC Desire).
Your first question has been answered by others already. The SDK is based on Dalvik, you're going to have to speak Java to the Android framework to do things like set up your activity, handle events, etc. You can call into a native code module built with the NDK for other things.
The multitouch situation on Android is dependent on hardware. Android >= 2.0 supports it in the framework, and you can use the PackageManager to query for what kind of multitouch functionality the device supports. The two you care about are FEATURE_TOUCHSCREEN_MULTITOUCH and FEATURE_TOUCHSCREEN_MULTITOUCH_DISTINCT. Some screens that only offer FEATURE_TOUCHSCREEN_MULTITOUCH have problems distinguishing precise movement when both fingers are along or near the same X or Y coordinate. This is fine for things like zoom gestures, but you might have problems doing dual-analog style controls on a device without FEATURE_TOUCHSCREEN_MULTITOUCH_DISTINCT.
Plan on supporting multiple resolutions. If you provide low and high resolution assets the resource system can select the appropriate ones for you automatically at runtime. More details on this here. You will still need to deal with different resolutions that do not necessarily share an aspect ratio. For example, the Droid is 480x854 while the Nexus One is 480x800.