Android Core

The standard design pattern for Google TV apps is generally to use the LeftNavBar library. Unfortunately there isn’t an apklib and it isn’t included as a google tv addon library, so one has to compile and work with the library itself. The LeftNavBar library is basically the action bar flipped vertically. The problem I have with it it is that ...

My app needed a simple Android notification with sound and icon. So here’s the code I used to make that happen. I know that there are many other types of notification in Android, but this time, I just want to show you a very simple code that can be a solution to your problem too! I will probably create a ...

Today we’ll discuss about custom loaders in Android. Loaders have been introduced from Android 3.0 but we can also use loaders in prior versions of Android starting from Android 1.6 with the help of Android compatibility library. In this tutorial we won’t discuss the basics of loader which is vastly available in the Internet. A very good tutorial on loaders ...

In this post I will show how to handle connection errors or the situation when the connection changes (i.e from UMTS to WI-FI). In all these cases we have to gracefully handle these errors and implement some strategies to try to reconnect if possible. In a perfect world when we connect to a remote server with HTTP protocol everything works ...

Hello Friends, Today I am sharing very simple useful post “Custom Grid View in Android”. All the code are given below just copy paste and enjoy. You can download zip folder from github also… MainActivity.java package com.manish.customgridview; import java.util.ArrayList; import android.os.Bundle; import android.app.Activity; import android.graphics.Bitmap; import android.graphics.BitmapFactory; import android.widget.GridView; /** * * @author manish.s * */ public class MainActivity extends ...

Have you ever worked with Rails’ migrations? They make database changes a breeze, don’t they? While every software release doesn’t necessarily involve a migration, when one does happen to make use of one, I’m always pleased on how easily things work out. Whether it’s to add new data or alter existing data structures, Rails migrations make evolving a datastore (be ...

One aspect that was in my opinion not covered in many blogs around, included mine too, it is the process we follow to create our Android app. This aspect is not irrelevant because an app is a piece of software and we should follow the rules and methods used to develop other kind of software component. I know we need ...

ActionBar supports different navigation types within activities. We saw in an older post that we can use Tabs to navigate or we can use Drop Down Navigation. In this post we will see how we can implement the drop down navigation using fragments. What is exactly the drop down navigation? It is essentially a list of items in the actionbar. This items represent action ...

Moving from Eclispe/ADT to Android Studio I was exploring some alternative configuration to improve my building environment. I came across a nice Android device emulator called Genymotion. I find it very interesting and really fast so that I decided to use it as my device emulator. In this post I will explain how to setup Android development environment using Android ...