Android Learnings    Android Learnings

Android SDK: Create an Interactive Screen Saver with Daydream

Daydream interactive screen savers are a new feature in Android 4.2 (API Level 17). With Daydream, you can create a screen saver with animation, interaction, and just about anything else you would include in an Android Activity. Daydream screen savers are displayed while the user device is charging. Users with devices running Jelly Bean 4.2 can select and configure a Daydream screen saver in their display settings. In this tutorial we’ll go through the required steps to create a Daydream screen saver for Android….



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Posted June 11, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Open Android market (Google Play Store) using Intent

To open google play store (Android market) using intent, just use the code snippet..



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Posted June 11, 2013 at 8:00 am


Window animations provide an easy way to animate transitions between activities. The animations can be customized to some extent, but there’s only so much interaction between the launching and launched activities that you can take advantage of with the standard window animations.
This episode covers a different technique for fully customizable animations…

Posted June 10, 2013 at 4:08 pm

Cloud Save – Part 1

In a previous series on Styling Android we looked at persisting data using the Data Backup APIs. However the Google documentation suggests that this technique is unsuitable for persisting app state across multiple devices, but more for persisting app state when a user replaces a device. At Google I/O 2013 a new API was introduced, which is part of Google Play Services, that is specifically designed to persist app state across multiple devices: Cloud Save. In this short series fo articles we’ll look at how to implement this….



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Posted June 8, 2013 at 8:00 am

Navigation Drawer – Part 3

In the previous article we began hooking our navigation drawer up to the ActionBar by connecting up the Up/Home button. In this concluding article we’ll change the ActionBar title, and hide any content-specific menus when the drawer is open…



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Posted June 6, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Handling Phone Call Requests the Right Way for Users

One of the things users like most about Android is the flexibility to choose which apps should handle common tasks on their devices — from opening a web page or sending an SMS to playing a music file, taking a picture, or making phone calls. This flexibility is provided by Intents. Intents give you a powerful way to integrate your apps deeply into the system — users can even choose to let your apps replace functionality provided by system apps. In those cases, it’s essential to make sure that anything your app can’t or doesn’t handle can still be handled properly by the default system app…



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Posted May 30, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Pushing the ActionBar to the next level

Back in November 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled ”ActionBar on the Move”. This article was mainly dealing with a technique to nicely and uniquely animate your ActionBar. Although I mentioned some of the effect’s possible applications, I never had time to effectively add an ActionBar animation to one of my own apps nor saw an application on the Play Store taking advantage of it. While being at Google I/O last week, I finally found an application using the ActionBar animation technique. Let’s be honest, it literally blew my mind the first time I saw it. I felt in love with the nice, subtle and yet extremely useful animated effect probably more than the entire app itself! I am pretty sure you know the application I am talking about as it has been presented during the Google I/O keynote. You have also probably recently received an update of it: Play Music!



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Posted May 30, 2013 at 8:00 am

(25) Adam Powell - Google+ - This is part 4 of a series on Android's navigation drawer…

This is part 4 of a series on Android’s navigation drawer pattern. You can catch up on previous parts here: Part 1: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/2zi4DXd3jkm Part 2: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/VdgexsZeXHW Part 3: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/8j2GVw72i1E



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Posted May 29, 2013 at 4:00 pm

(25) Adam Powell - Google+ - This is part 3 of a series on the new Android navigation…

This is part 3 of a series on the new Android navigation drawer pattern. You can read the previous parts here: Part 1: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/2zi4DXd3jkm Part 2: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/VdgexsZeXHW



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Posted May 29, 2013 at 8:00 am

(25) Adam Powell - Google+ - This is part 2 in a series. You can read part 1 here:…

This is part 2 in a series. You can read part 1 here: https://plus.google.com/+AdamWPowell/posts/2zi4DXd3jkm One of the first decisions we made around navigation drawers was to leave the action bar fixed and we published this stipulation in the Design Guide very early. This was for a couple of reasons.



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Posted May 28, 2013 at 4:00 pm