Android Blog Launched

Hola Androiders!

This is our Android blog. We'll be writing here about everything related to the development of our directory of Free Android Software. The directory went online just in 2 days after the release of the very first Android Software Development Kit. Thus Android Freeware Directory is the first repository of applications and games dedicated to the Android mobile platform.

Since the launch we were constantly monitoring and adding to the directory all upcoming Android soft. We also owe a big THANK YOU to all those users who were contributing to the directory. We want to encourage even more Android fans and developers to fill the database with free and quality content. Remember, we are building this resource for You and another fellow Android OS fans!

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The rocky road to m5

Even though I slept over the release of m5-rc14 SDK release because of my hurdles with the synchronization framework, I lost no time test driving it. I ported the UI part of the sync example program to M5 which contains three activities and a content provider. The port was much more time consuming than I expected.

I knew in advance from the release notes that I will have troubles with the content provider because android.net.ContentURI has gone and was replaced by android.net.Uri. What I did not expect, however, is that because of minor schema changes, the layout and manifest XML files also require quite an amount of handwork. What was previously

[ListView id="@+id/android:list"


now has to become


[ListView android:id="@+id/android:list"

(XML mangling because of the blog engine limitations)
This required 7 changes in the layout files of the rather primitive application. The Android manifest was also changed for good. Gone are the class and value attributes and now everything is a name.

Before:
[activity class=".SyncExample2" android:label="SyncExample2"
After:
[activity android:name="SyncExample2" android:label="SyncExample2"]
Overall, 6 changes in the 21 lines of the Android manifest file.

Updating the content provider was really painful. The replacement of android.net.ContentURI with android.net.Uri and other class changes required 20 changes in the very simple content provider with 229 lines. I marked all changes as comments so you can review them in the code.

You can download the example program from here.

And when I thought that everything was done, it turned out that the NotificationManager (that I used fortunately at two places only) has also changed. Transient notifications are widgets nowadays and are created like this:

Toast.makeText(this, "message", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

In order not to make it boring, the documentation remarks merrily that android.widget.Toast may not be the final name of the thing. And I did not even mention the changes of the undocumented API that the content provider list views use - well, one uses undocumented API at one's own risk.

Overall, seemingly minor changes of API "beatification" cause significant work even on smaller programs. As a bonus, you may marvel at the new UI. Installed applications went to the main screen.



And look at this horizontal menu!

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