Android App Development: Menus Part 3: Alternative Menus

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On March 16, 2011

Android offers a third type of menus: Alternative menus which allow multiple applications to use each other. An application menu can contain menu items that point to other applications that deal with a certain data type that is passed from the application by an intent. This functionality is related to the concept of Content Providers […]

Android App Development: Menus Part 2: Context Menus

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On March 9, 2011

Context menus are the menus that appear when you right-click in windows. In android Context menu are attached to widgets and the appear when you click on the widget for a long time (long click). To add context menus to widgets you have to do two things: Register the widget for a context menu. Add […]

Android App Development: Menus part 1: Options menu

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On March 2, 2011

In today’s Android App Development tutorial we are going to go over the options menu. Android phones have the menu button which displays a menu with several items that provide navigation or more functionality or settings to your applications. Android has three types of menus Options menu. Context menu. Alternative menus. Menu items can be […]

Android App Development: Using intents to pass data and return results between activities

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On February 23, 2011

In my previous tutorial I explained how intents describe an action to be performed. We learned how to launch phone activities like phone dialer with intents, and how we passed data (The phone number to dial) to the phone activity. In this post I’m going to see show you how to use intents to launch […]

Android App Development: Intents and Intent filters

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On February 16, 2011

Intents are used by an application to interact with the phone’s hardware components or other applications, or to start a service or activity with a certain piece of data or to broadcast that an event has occurred. Using Intents to launch phone activities: We can use Intents to launch the phone’s basic activities such as the […]

Android App Development: Using Themes and Styles in Android

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On February 9, 2011

In web design we have the concept of Styles and Themes. Styles like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) define the values of the web controls attributes such as width, height, font color, background and so on. A style can be applied on several controls in several web pages. Themes are used to group a set of […]

Android App development: Tabbed Activities

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On February 2, 2011

Some times we want to wrap multiple views in a single window and navigate throught them with a Tab Container. this can be done in Android using TabHost control There are two ways to use a TabHost application in Android: Using the TabHost to navigate through multiple views within the same activity. Using the TabHost […]

Android App Development: Activity Life Cycle

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On January 26, 2011

The activity is the core of an android application. Each application can have one or more activities. In this post we are going to explore the activity’s life cycle and understand the event handler of each stage through the activity’s life cycle. Activities in the system are managed in an activity stack (Last in Last […]

Android App Development – Using Android resources part 2: Image, Color, Arrays and Dimensions Resources

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On January 12, 2011

Image Resources: Android provides us with the ability to use image resources in our applications. We can put image files in res/drawable directory and access them from the xml layout or by the generated ID from R.java class file. You can use image files of the following formats: PNG JPEG GIF we have three drawable […]

Android App Development – Using Android resources part 1: String Resources

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On January 5, 2011

Resources in Android are files stored under the res directory of your project. Resources can be physical files (Audio, video, images, text, etc…) or xml files that declare some values to use in your application. Why use Resources: The resources are bound to the application in a way that you can change them without needing […]