Practical Android

  A much needed, sometimes hidden in the framework, and mimicked with unnecessary WebViews and sort of inner HTML injections to xml resources – a bullet list is much easier to implement then you would expect. When taking the easy solution – using WebViews , you are making the UI hierarchy much heavier then it should be, and when your UI is already rich with layouts and widgets, it seems bad to overload it with heavy WebViews. The Android.text framework gives us – the developers an easy to use API to build special text spans, in the next code snippet we’ll see how a bullet list can be implemented: let’s say we have a simple TextView which we need to hold a text with a bullet at the left hand of it: TextView mTv = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.tv_1); CharSequence cs = getText(R.String.sample_text); SpannableString ss = new SpannableString(cs); ss.setSpan(new BulletSpan(15), 0, cs.length(), 0); mTv.setText(ss);   Explanation: 1. Get a hook on a TextView 2. Construct ...

On every Google IO, many advocates for the Android platform demonstrate and teach us how to build great apps. The term “Great Apps” consists of many aspects – user experience, performance, saving battery life, not wasting expensive 3G quota and more..in this post i’ll try to demonstrate a simple way to not waste battery life in an Animation oriented activity. Let’s say that after displaying a nifty splash screen, your main activity consists of some animations which act in some sort of an infinite loop, to change pictures, articles, maybe polling data from a web service (asynctask of some sort). needless to say, that all of these processes take a lot of juice from the battery, so why worry about it? well, if we are focused in that activity, there’s not much we can do because it’s in the foreground and the user probably has some interactions with the current activity. but what happens once it’s not focused anymore? all these tasks don’t just stop themselves, it’s in our respons...