Styling Android

Following on from last week’s minor detour, we’ll resume this series by adding another new feature that was introduced in Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean): Daydreams.

A PC-style screensaver is not practical on a mobile device much of the time because on a mobile device you want to power down the display when the device is idle to conserve power. However, from 4.2 onwards Android supports a Daydream which is a screensaver mode which becomes active when the device is connected to an external power source, and typically the Daydream is displayed rather than powering down the display as power is not so much of an issue. This can be useful for having a night mode, or providing custom behaviours when the device is docked. In this article we’ll add a Daydream to our Text Clock app.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous articles in this series we’ve been looking at creating an extremely simple app which has been published to Google Play. Since the update covered in the last article (V1.1.0) was published a bug has been discovered in the app. In this article we’ll look at the tools available to developers to enable us to detect bugs, and implement a fix.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article we fixed some subtle issues with the appearance of our App Widget. Next we’re going to look to extend out App Widget to include some features specific to newer versions of Android while maintaining backward compatibility.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article we got our Text Clock widget telling the correct time, and it was published to Google Play. While the widget functions correctly, there are a couple of things that can be improved. In this article we’ll look at those and address them.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article we got the time displaying on our Text Clock app widget, but the time did not update. In this article we’ll use AlarmManager to get the widget updating periodically.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article we got an app widget background displaying on the home screen, but it does not actually display any real data, which is somewhat useless! In this article we’ll look at displaying the time on our app widget.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article we got the project set up for our Text Clock app, and added the business logic code. In this article we’ll begin creating an App Widget that the user can add to their home page.
Read the rest of this entry »

Usually on Styling Android the focus is on individual, standalone features and techniques for Android UI / UX development. In this series we’re going to create a very simple app which will be published to Google Play. While we will certainly cover some features and techniques that we haven’t looked at before, as well as some new features in Android 4.2, we’ll also look at some of the design decisions required to get even the simplest of apps ready for market.
Read the rest of this entry »

Back in November 2011 I posted a two part series to Styling Android which covered GridLayout which was introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich (API 14). In those articles, I have mentioned that there were hints from Google’s Dianne Hackbourn that it would be released as a compatibility library project, and it has been. However, there are some tweaks required to get it working with the code from the previous articles, so in this article we’ll look at how to convert the code from the earlier articles to use the compatibility library implementation of GridLayout.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous article in this series we enabled the handling of connection and disconnection of external displays within our app, and also changed the theme which was applied to the Presentation that was displayed on the external display. In this concluding article in this series we’ll look at an alternate mechanism for detecting display connectivity changes, and determining the available presentation displays.
Read the rest of this entry »