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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).

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

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

Getting Started with Android Development

weimenglee — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:18:38 +0000

Unless you have been hiding in the caves for the past couple of months, by now you must have heard of the mobile platform from Google that everyone is talking about. Yes, that's right, I am talking about Android. Android is an open source mobile operating system that is based on the Linux kernel. Using Android, device manufacturers can customize the OS to suit their particular hardware design, thereby allowing them to innovate without limitations.

Developing Location Based Services: Introducing the Location API for J2ME

nicogoeminne — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:10:02 +0000

Many mobile phones today support the Location API for J2ME under JSR-179. Using the location API, you can easily develop useful location based mobile Java applications. In this article, we demonstrate how to develop and test a mobile location based client server application using JSR-179, servlets and Google Maps.

Email configuration via SMS

Julien Buratto — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:21:46 +0000

Many of you will have experienced how a call to a network operator has resulted in an SMS containing configuration settings being sent to your phone. In this article we will look at how to configure a mobile phone's email account settings via SMS. Many phones support POP3 and IMAP accounts; in this example we are going to configure a simple POP3 account.

To check emails, an access point (APN) is also needed, so we will also configure an internet connection.

Introduction to WURFL

admin — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:50:14 +0000

Complying to standards is not always easy, but it is very important so that browsers will display your contents as you envisioned them and that search engines can interpret your pages correctly. The W3C started the Mobile Web Initiative in 2005. The initiative wants, among the other things, to provide a set of best practices to make sure that web developers can produce sites that are mobile friendly.