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Android, Mobile

How to Send an Email

August 31st 2009 | Posted by msino

Another common requirement is to send an email from your application. At first, this looks easy. You use an ACTION_SEND Intent as demonstrated by the example on OpenIntents…
Intent sendIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, “email text”);
sendIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, “Subject”);
sendIntent.setType(”message/rfc822″);
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(sendIntent, “Title:”));
However, this sends the email via the Android mail app in the phone, prompting you which email app if you have more [...]

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Android, Mobile

How to do Text to Speech

August 31st 2009 | Posted by msino

TTS 1.4 has very recently become available on the Android Market. TTS has been created by Charles Chen, Software Engineering Team and T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google.
You can use the TTS library in your own applications. There are also some hints and tips how to use TTS in your application.

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Android

Custom Android Tabs

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

Due to limitation of Android Tab component I created a custom TabWidget that I am using in couple different projects already. The widget allows us to  add custom background and use custom icons, tabs   can be Top/Bottom aligned.

Currently tabs can launch new Activity and  Dialog , when starting new Activity we can use  “startActivityForResult” so [...]

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Android

How to Open a URL from Code

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

Many apps end up opening a web page at some point. This is often useful to allow changeable information to shown, such as a help screen, that can be maintained on a web server in light of questions from users.
I have come across three ways to do this. The first is to create a android.webkit.WebView [...]

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Android

Creating an Input Method

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

To create an input method (IME) for entering text into text fields and other Views, you need to extendandroid.inputmethodservice.InputMethodService. This API provides much of the basic implementation for an input method, in terms of managing the state and visibility of the input method and communicating with the currently visible activity.
A good starting point would be [...]

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Mobile

Modifying the Android logcat stream for full-color debugging

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

So I whipped up a quick Python script that reformats the logcat output into a colorful stream that is much easier to visually follow.
One feature I really like is that it allocates unique colors for each “tag” used.  This makes it really easy to visually separate dozens of tags into their source apps, and makes it [...]

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Android

Introducing GLSurfaceView

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

GLSurfaceView is a new API class in Android 1.5. GLSurfaceView makes OpenGL ES applications easier to write by:

Providing the glue code to connect OpenGL ES to the View system.
Providing the glue code to make OpenGL ES work with the Activity life-cycle.
Making it easy to choose an appropriate frame buffer pixel format.
Creating and managing a separate rendering thread [...]

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Android

Drawable mutations

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

Android’s drawables are extremely useful to easily build applications. A Drawable is a pluggable drawing container that is usually associated with a View. For instance, a BitmapDrawable is used to display images, aShapeDrawable to draw shapes and gradients, etc. You can even combine them to create complex renderings.
Drawables allow you to easily customize the rendering of the [...]

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Android

Backward compatibility for Android applications

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

Android 1.5 introduced a number of new features that application developers can take advantage of, like virtual input devices and speech recognition. As a developer, you need to be aware of backward compatibility issues on older devices—do you want to allow your application to run on all devices, or just those running newer software? In [...]

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Android

Android Widget Design Guidelines

August 30th 2009 | Posted by msino

Since the beginning of the year, the Android UI team has been hard at work on the Android 1.5 release. Starting today with widgets, we would like to share some of our evolving Android design principles with you.
Widgets are a new feature that application developers can use to promote a small sample of the most [...]

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