The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development

668 Pages·2011·13.62 MB·English

by  Mark L. Murphy

The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android
Development
by Mark L. Murphy
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The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development
by Mark L. Murphy
Copyright © 2009-11 CommonsWare, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Printing History:
Dec 2011:Version 2.2 ISBN: 978-0-9816780-5-4
The CommonsWare name and logo, “Busy Coder's Guide”, and related trade dress are
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The publisher and author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions or for damages
resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to the Warescription!..........................................................xxi
Preface................................................................................................xxiii
Welcome to the Book!.............................................................................xxiii
Prerequisites............................................................................................xxiii
Getting Help.............................................................................................xxiv
Warescription............................................................................................xxv
Errata and the Book Bug Bounty.............................................................xxv
Source Code............................................................................................xxvii
Creative Commons and the Four-to-Free (42F) Guarantee...............xxviii
Lifecycle of a CommonsWare Book.....................................................xxviii
WebView, Inside and Out........................................................................1
Friends with Benefits....................................................................................1
Turnabout is Fair Play..................................................................................7
Crafting Your Own Views.......................................................................13
Pick Your Poison..........................................................................................13
Colors, Mixed How You Like Them...........................................................15
The Layout.............................................................................................16
The Attributes.......................................................................................18
The Class................................................................................................19
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Seeing It In Use....................................................................................24
More Fun With ListViews......................................................................27
Giant Economy-Size Dividers....................................................................27
Choosing What Is Selectable...............................................................28
Introducing MergeAdapter.................................................................29
Lists via Merges....................................................................................30
How MergeAdapter Does It................................................................34
From Head To Toe......................................................................................37
Control Your Selection...............................................................................40
Create a Unified Row View..................................................................41
Configure the List, Get Control on Selection....................................42
Change the Row...................................................................................44
Stating Your Selection................................................................................46
Creating Drawables...............................................................................49
Traversing Along a Gradient.....................................................................49
State Law......................................................................................................53
A Stitch In Time Saves Nine......................................................................55
The Name and the Border...................................................................56
Padding and the Box............................................................................57
Stretch Zones........................................................................................57
Tooling..................................................................................................59
Using Nine-Patch Images....................................................................60
Home Screen App Widgets....................................................................65
East is East, and West is West...................................................................66
The Big Picture for a Small App Widget..................................................66
Crafting App Widgets................................................................................68
The Manifest.........................................................................................68
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The Metadata.......................................................................................69
The Layout............................................................................................70
The BroadcastReceiver.........................................................................71
The Result.............................................................................................73
Another and Another.................................................................................75
App Widgets: Their Life and Times..........................................................76
Controlling Your (App Widget's) Destiny................................................76
Change Your Look......................................................................................77
One Size May Not Fit All...........................................................................79
Advanced App Widgets on Android 3.x...................................................80
New Widgets for App Widgets...........................................................80
Preview Images.....................................................................................81
Adapter-Based App Widgets...............................................................83
Being a Good Host......................................................................................95
Interactive Maps....................................................................................97
Get to the Point..........................................................................................98
Getting the Latitude and Longitude...................................................98
Getting the Screen Position................................................................98
Not-So-Tiny Bubbles.................................................................................100
Options for Pop-up Panels.................................................................101
Defining a Panel Layout......................................................................101
Creating a PopupPanel Class.............................................................103
Showing and Hiding the Panel..........................................................103
Tying It Into the Overlay...................................................................104
Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign....................................................................111
Selected States......................................................................................111
Per-Item Drawables.............................................................................112
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Changing Drawables Dynamically.....................................................113
In A New York Minute. Or Hopefully a Bit Faster..................................117
A Little Touch of Noo Yawk.....................................................................120
Touch Events.......................................................................................120
Finding an Item...................................................................................122
Dragging the Item...............................................................................124
Creating Custom Dialogs and Preferences.........................................127
Your Dialog, Chocolate-Covered..............................................................127
Basic AlertDialog Setup......................................................................129
Handling Color Changes.....................................................................131
State Management...............................................................................131
Preferring Your Own Preferences, Preferably.........................................132
The Constructor..................................................................................133
Creating the View................................................................................133
Dealing with Preference Values.........................................................134
Using the Preference...........................................................................136
Advanced Fragments and the Action Bar...........................................139
About the Sample App..............................................................................139
What the User Sees............................................................................140
The Data Model (Such As It Is and What There Is Of It)...............148
Dynamic Fragments..................................................................................150
Fragments and Panes..........................................................................150
Fragments and Activities....................................................................152
Running a FragmentTransaction.......................................................153
Action Bar Navigation Options................................................................162
Tabs Mode...........................................................................................162
"List" Mode..........................................................................................167
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Dialog Fragments......................................................................................168
"Lights Out"...............................................................................................172
Leveraging the Home Icon........................................................................173
And All The Rest........................................................................................175
PersistentListFragment.......................................................................175
ContentFragment................................................................................178
ItemsActivity........................................................................................181
Other Bits of Goodness.............................................................................182
Custom Navigation Mode..................................................................182
Dynamic Menus..................................................................................183
More On Retained Instances....................................................................184
The Activity.........................................................................................184
The Fragment......................................................................................185
What We Really Should Be Doing....................................................186
Action Modes.......................................................................................189
Saying Goodbye to Context Menus.........................................................190
Manual Action Modes..............................................................................190
Choosing Your Trigger........................................................................191
Starting the Action Mode...................................................................192
Implementing the Action Mode........................................................193
Multiple-Modal-Choice Action Modes...................................................196
Animating Widgets..............................................................................203
It's Not Just For Toons Anymore.............................................................203
A Quirky Translation...............................................................................204
Mechanics of Translation..................................................................204
Imagining a Sliding Panel..................................................................205
The Aftermath....................................................................................205
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Introducing SlidingPanel..................................................................206
Using the Animation.........................................................................208
Fading To Black. Or Some Other Color.................................................208
Alpha Numbers..................................................................................209
Animations in XML............................................................................209
Using XML Animations......................................................................210
When It's All Said And Done...................................................................210
Loose Fill.....................................................................................................211
Hit The Accelerator...................................................................................212
Animate. Set. Match..................................................................................213
Active Animations.....................................................................................214
Using the Camera.................................................................................217
Sneaking a Peek.........................................................................................217
The Permission and the Feature........................................................218
The SurfaceView.................................................................................219
The Camera.........................................................................................220
Image Is Everything..................................................................................224
Asking for a Camera. Maybe.............................................................224
Getting the Camera............................................................................225
Asking for a Format...........................................................................226
Taking a Picture..................................................................................227
Using AsyncTask................................................................................228
Maintaining Your Focus...........................................................................230
All the Bells and Whistles.........................................................................231
Playing Media.......................................................................................233
Get Your Media On...................................................................................233
Making Noise............................................................................................234
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Streaming Limitations.......................................................................240
Moving Pictures........................................................................................240
Other Ways to Make Noise.....................................................................244
SoundPool...........................................................................................244
AudioTrack.........................................................................................245
ToneGenerator...................................................................................246
Handling System Events.....................................................................249
Get Moving, First Thing...........................................................................249
The Permission...................................................................................250
The Receiver Element........................................................................250
The Receiver Implementation............................................................251
New Behavior With Android 3.1........................................................252
I Sense a Connection Between Us...........................................................253
Feeling Drained.........................................................................................255
Sticky Intents and the Battery..........................................................260
Battery and the Emulator...................................................................261
Other Power Triggers........................................................................262
Advanced Service Patterns..................................................................263
Remote Services........................................................................................263
When IPC Attacks!.............................................................................264
A Consumer Economy.......................................................................266
Service From Afar...............................................................................268
Servicing the Service..........................................................................274
The Bind That Fails............................................................................280
If the Binding Is Too Tight.................................................................281
AlarmManager: Making the Services Run On Time..............................283
The WakefulIntentService Pattern...................................................283
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