Android Core

In this post, we want to describe how to create a simple torch app in Android. It is a nice example, because we can explore some Android API about Android Camera. We will use Android Studio as IDE to develop the app. This app will not only use the flash light but we can implement a stroboscopic light too where ...

Introduction Developing applications for mobile devices gives us a lot more opportunities for context based information than a traditional web application. One of the inputs for context sensitive information is the users current location. This post describes several ways an Android application can obtain the users current location. Location API’s In previous versions of the Android SDK you had to ...

In this post, we want to talk about Android Bound Service. A bound service is a service that allows other android components (like activity) to bind to it and send and receive data. In the previous post, we talked about local service and we saw how we can create a service, start and stop it. A bound service is a ...

In this post, we want to talk about Android Service. This is a key component in developing Android app. Differently from Activity, Service in Android runs in background, they don’t have an interface and have a life-cycle very different from Activities. Using Service we can implement some background operation, for example we can suppose we want to load a web ...

In this post, I will show you an simple example of how to pass object by intent in Android application. Parcelable and Serialization are used for marshaling and unmarshaling Java objects. In Parcelable, developers write custom code for marshaling and unmarshaling so it creates less garbage objects in comparison to Serialization. The performance of Parcelable over Serialization dramatically improves (around ...

If you want to use the YouTube API v2 to search for content on YouTube with an Android device, the recommended way is the use the gdata-http-client java package. However, this requires that you parse the XML returned yourself, and navigate it. The reason is that out of the box the YouTube API v2 java library doesn’t work on Android. ...

One alternative to using SQLite on Android is to store Java objects in SharedPreferences. Here, we’ll look at two different ways to do that. Why not go for SQLite for all storage needs? The reasons can be varied: besides the impedance mismatch between object orientation and relational databases, SQLite might be overkill (brings more overhead) for some simple use cases, ...

In my previous post How to inject Android compiled .apk package into its Device Emulator from the command line. I have demonstrated how to add your compiled .apk file to android emulator, from command line with adb command, included in ADT platform tools. One of my friends commented: " Are u really using the emulator…..it is very slow. Even on ...

Android Studio IDE is launched at Google I/O 2013. Android Studio is based on  Intellij IDEA which aims to replace Eclipse + Android Developer Tools for Android development. And since Google itself is pushing it, it may catch up with eclipse soon. Android has its pros and cons compared to eclipse. + Android Studio has better support for UI design and ...