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Scripting Your Android Device
One of the issues that arose when Apple released the iPhone SDK earlier this year was the restriction on language interpreters: No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and …
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Fancy ListViews, Part Six: Custom Widget
In this, the last and longest of our Fancy ListView posts, we’ll cover what it takes to wrap up the logic from the ChecklistDemo from a previous post and turn it into a reusable CheckListView that can serve as a drop-in replacement for ListView. Before …
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Fancy ListViews, Part Four
In our last episode, we took a closer look at the ViewHolder/ViewWrapper pattern for making ListViews that much more efficient to render. Today, we switch gears, and take a look at having interactive elements in ListView rows. Specifically, we’ll look at a crude implementation of …
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Fancy ListViews, Part Three
In our last episode, we saw how we could save processing time — and, hence, battery life — by recycling existing row views in our fancy lists, simply by checking and reusing the convertView parameter passed into our getView(). In his comment to this series’ …
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Fancy ListViews, Part Two
In our last episode, we saw how to create Android ListViews that contain more than just a simple list of strings. In particular, we saw the ultimate form of customization: subclassing an Adapter class, overriding getView(), and returning our own View for each row, perhaps …
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Fancy ListViews, Part One
The classic Android ListView is a plain list of text — solid but uninspiring. This is the first in a series of posts where we will see how to create a ListView with a bit more pizazz. Today, in particular, we will see two techniques …
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Inflation is a Good Thing
Before diving into the topic of creating fancy lists in Android, we need to take a short detour into some background material. If you have written activities for Android, you are used to calling setContentView() with the resource ID of some XML layout you specified. …
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Gettin’ On The (Message) Bus, Part Two
In our last episode, we discussed how the Android Intent systems functions, in effect, like a message bus, and how one can set up an IntentReceiver to serve as a consumer of bus messages. Today, let’s complete the picture, creating both a message consumer and …
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Gettin’ On The (Message) Bus, Part One
The message bus is a tried-and-true model in application development. Whether it is the humble Win32 message loop or full-fledged publish/subscribe message-oriented middleware solution, software components have long been publishing messages that other components receive, either by explicitly checking some message queue or by virtue …
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Handling Multiple Resource Sets, Part Two
In the last episode of “Building ‘Droids”, we covered how to handle a simple, one-criterion choice between two resource sets: whether we show English or Spanish strings. In that case, having two res/ subdirectories (res/values-en/ and res/values-es/), each with their own set of strings, was …
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Handling Multiple Resource Sets, Part One
Welcome to the new “Building ‘Droids†section of AndroidGuys! This column looks at Android from the developer’s perspective, poking around dusty corners of the Android SDK, and showing how you can create interesting and effective Android applications. Today, we’ll talk about how to have your …
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