Android Core

In this post I want to describe how to detect faces in an image using Android. I will use the camera to get the picture and then the app will draws some rectangle around the faces detected in the image. To do it we simply use the Android API like: FaceDetector used to detect face in the bitmap Face  object ...

Today I’m going to share a working code to make a very simple compass application for your android device.   Some android device (like Huawei Y300 and Lenovo P700i) does not have full support of motions sensors so this code will not work for them. Video Demo Our code for today will run just like this:         ...

In a previous article, we looked at how to set up Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) in Android applications. We learned that GCM is a free service that allows us to push messages from the cloud to a number of mobile recipients running our Android application and registered with our service. The push messages can be either collapsible or non-collapsible. “Collapsible” ...

A geofence is a virtual perimeter of interest that can be set up to fire notifications when it is entered or exited, or both. For example, a geofencing app can alert us that our kid has left a previously specified area, or send us a coupon (e.g. the “Present this SMS an get 20% off” offer type) when we happen ...

Here are some tips from my personal experience so far with Android development. The number of tips is actually ten, so I could have called this “Ten Tips for Android Development“, but I figured there were already enough articles with that catchy title. Which reminds me of late comedian George Carlin : I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here ...

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 ...