Every once in a while you go back to your toolbox and discover something shiny you haven’t shown the world before. I have a client who needed some OpenGL work done on Android, which brings up the whole question of how to unit test OpenGL code. I had some support classes for this lurking around […]
Android error: android.permission.INTERACT_ACROSS_USERS_FULL
In developing an application recently, I ran into a very odd error that happened in the release build but not the debug build. The stack trace looked like this: After a bunch of head-banging, it turns out that the android.permission.INTERACT_ACROSS_USERS_FULL part was a complete red herring. The real key in this stack trace is line […]
Android Fragment Lifecycle In Detail
There are numerous articles on the Internet that provide an overview of the Android Activity lifecycle, as well as the corresponding Fragment lifecycle. One thing that I have found lacking, however, is a detailed examination of the relationship between the two - in particular, exactly what events trigger what other events. Thus, I've set out to remedy that particular lack with this blog post.
Using Android AsyncTask to initialize a database
When it comes to keeping user interfaces “lively,” threads are our friends. But Threads are a real pain in the neck. Such is the life of a programmer. It’s important that we design applications so that the user interface stays alive. Not only does this improve our user’s experience with our apps, but it keeps […]
Themes for the Android ActionBar – ActionBarItems
So far, we’ve covered theming tabs on an Android ActionBar, as well as drop-down navigation lists. The final item to be covered are buttons embedded within the ActionBar.
Themes for the Android ActionBar – Drop-downs
In the previous post, we dealt with theming tabs in the Android ActionBar. The ActionBar provides an alternate type of navigation – a drop-down list. You can specifically request this via: or you can sometimes unexpectedly find yourself in this situation if you try to create a lot of tabs, since Android may choose to […]
Themes for the Android ActionBar – Tabs
Since Android 3.0 (a.k.a. “Honeycomb”) the ActionBar has been the workhorse of “standard” Android user interfaces. The nice folks over at ActionBarSherlock.com have also created a set of classes and resources that allow you to build ActionBar-based UI’s all the way back to Android 2.0 (“Eclair”). Unfortunately, customizing the look of the ActionBar is not, […]