Java

Displaying Status Bar Notifications in Android

weimenglee — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:59:05 +0000

Developers of Android are no doubt familiar with the Toast class, which displays a little pop-up containing whatever message you want to display to the user. However, the Toast pop-up will automatically dismiss itself after a while, making it useful as a tool to provide timely feedback to the user (such as informing the user that a file has been saved successfully), but not a really good tool to use for some asynchronous action (such as telling the user that an incoming SMS message has arrived).

Preserving User Preferences in Android Applications

weimenglee — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:32:04 +0000

Often you need to store personalized information for each user of your application. For example, your application may require users to logon to a secure server for authentication. In this case, the user needs to supply his credentials, such as a login name and a password. The first time the user uses your application this information will be entered by the user, but subsequently it would be useful for your application to “remember” this information somewhere so that it can save the user the trouble of entering the same information every time he uses your application.

Sending SMS with SMPP, Kannel and Java

senthadev@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:30:28 +0000

There are many technologies and protocols that can be used to send and receive SMS from an application. This article focuses on sending SMS via a Short Message Service Center (SMSC), with the help of the Kannel SMS gateway.

In order for an application to send a SMS, it generally has to communicate with a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) over the Internet. To understand in more detail consider the following example.

A Media service provider wants to send a program timetable as an SMS to its end customers. The application is running on a Linux based java application server.

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 3: More Views

weimenglee — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:59:23 +0000

In the previous article, you saw the various basic views such as the TextView, EditText, Button, and how you can use them in your Android applications. In this article, we shall continue our exploration of another three categories of views - Picker views, List views, and Display views. The views discussed include:

TimePicker view
DatePicker view
ListView view
Spinner view
Gallery view
ImageView
ImageSwitcher view
GridView view

Getting Started with Java ME

Soma Ghosh — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:30:36 +0000

As the world gets connected, we see the emergence of a wide variety of sophisticated and personalized mobile devices. Although the number-crunching power of the higher-end devices is very respectable, there is still a need to build applications that use minimal resources, and that are portable.

Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME), formerly known as J2ME, with Java’s inherent ‘Build once, run everywhere’ concept has been adapted to build resource constraint applications for these myriad devices.

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 2: Views

weimenglee — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:31:47 +0000

In the previous article on Android UI you saw the components that make up the UI of an Android application. The basic unit of the Android UI is the View. A View represents a widget that has an appearance on the screen. In this article (and the next two), you will learn about the various common views that you would likely use in your journey of Android development. In particular, I have categorized the views in this series into the following group:

Basic Views - commonly-used views such as TextView, EditText, and Button views

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 1: Layouts

weimenglee — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:13:47 +0000

So far in my previous few articles on Android I have focused on showing you how to get things done in Android without really spending too much time discussing the visual aspect of Android application development - User Interface design. In this article, and the next, I will walk you through the various elements that make up the UI of an Android application. In this first part of the article, I will discuss the various layouts available in Android to position the various widgets on your screen.

Using Google Maps in Android

weimenglee — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:17:40 +0000

Google Maps is one of the many applications bundled with the Android platform. In addition to simply using the Maps application, you can also embed it into your own applications and make it do some very cool things. In this article, I will show you how to use Google Maps in your Android applications and how to programmatically perform the following:

Change the views of Google Maps
Obtain the latitude and longitude of locations in Google Maps
Perform geocoding and reverse geocoding
Add markers to Google Maps

Ready.mobi API update

ruadhan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:50:38 +0000

We've just gone live with an new version of the ready.mobi API. (Full details and code samples here). So what's new in this version? The most notable feature in this version is the ability to post markup directly to the ready.mobi API without having to supply a publicly accessible URL to the service.

This is the result of some early feedback on the API that during the development cycle pages often did not have a public URL, and so they could not be tested with ready.mobi.

SMS Messaging in Android

weimenglee — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:20:12 +0000

It would be safe to say that nearly every mobile phone sold in the past decade has SMS messaging capabilities. In fact, SMS messaging is one great killer application for the mobile phone and it has created a steady revenue stream for mobile operators. Understanding how to use SMS messaging in your application can provide you with many ideas to create the next killer application.