Basic ActionBar – Part 1

The Android ActionBar was first introduced in Honeycomb and provides us with a rich framework for providing user actions and navigation to the user. In this article we’ll have a look at the basics of the ActionBar and get a simple implementation up and running very quickly.

Plurals

When writing software, it is often the tasks that appear trivial which can prove to be rather problematic. In this article we’ll have a look at creating plural strings which, on the surface looks easy, but can cause some unforeseen problems when it comes to actually implementing it.

Maven and Android – Part 6

In the previous article we looked at the Maven build lifecycle. In this concluding part, we’ll have a brief tour of some of the more advanced things that we can do with Maven which may convince you that Mavenising your build can provide you with great benefits.

Maven and Android – Part 5

In the previous article we had a look at Maven repositories and saw how Maven can automatically retrieve artifacts from public repositories an put them in to our local one. In this article we’ll look at the Maven build lifecycle, and how we can use Maven to put our own artifacts in to repositories.

Maven and Android – Part 3

In the previous article looked at some errors that were occurring in our Maven build of an Android project. At the end it appeared that everything was now working, but in fact it was not. In this article we’ll look at how the Eclipse and Maven build processes work together in parallel.

Maven and Android – Part 2

In the previous article we installed Maven and some Android related tools, and got an existing project converted to a Maven build. We had an error because despite all of the tools we installed, Maven itself does not know how to build Android apps. In this article we’ll fix the build and begin to get…

Maven and Android – Part 1

Apache Maven is a build automation tool which does an awful lot more besides. I have used Maven for a number of years for server-side projects and think that it is a fantastic tool. I have tried it on a number of occasions for automating Android builds but always either hit problems, or just found…

Transparency – Part 4

In the previous article in this series we have looked at some techniques for using transparency as a means to keep our text clearly visible. In this article we’re going to move away from text and look at some other neat things that we can do with transparency.

Transparency – Part 3

In the previous article we looked at the GridLayout label pattern and explored how it is designed to keep the label text visible irrespective of the background. In this article we’ll look at this concept further.