This is my call to arms for all Android users…buy more apps and talk about them, show them to your friends family and co-workers, blog about them, tweet about them, post pictures, let’s talk this shit up!  Everyone is comparing Android to the iPhone or Palm…you’re wasting your time, let’s spend those valuable keystrokes talking about how awesome the apps are on Android market and not trying to make comparisons to other platforms.  The more marketing buzz we can create about Android apps and how hard the single developers or small dev shops are working to create these products the better it is for all of us.  Not only do I want my apps to be successful but I’d love to hear about Phil Symonds making a million bucks on Abduction or how the college students who developed Heat paid their way through college developing Android apps.

So, show some love, and make sure to spend the buck or two for the app which that guy or gal spent many’a hours creating and testing…and let others know also.  I hope all this doesn’t sound to much like self promotion, but I really believe that it behooves all of us to have a vibrant and profitable Android app market.

Using a Service and ACTION_SCREEN_OFF  I’ve successfully added a new feature to MediaDroid which cycles the images in your photo album.  Every time the screen is put to sleep, the next photo in the album is placed in the photo widget on the Home screen of your Android device.  Here’s a code snippet…

public class ChangeImageService extends Service
{
	private static final boolean LOGD = Constants.LOGD;

	private BroadcastReceiver _receiver;
	private static final String LOG_TAG = "ChangeImageService";

        @Override
	public void onCreate()
        {
		super.onCreate();

	    _receiver = new BroadcastReceiver()
	    {
	        public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent)
	        {
	        	loadNextImage();
	        }
	    };

	    IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_OFF);
	    registerReceiver(_receiver, filter);
	}

....
}

A couple of gotchas you have to watch out for… The ACTION_SCREEN_OFF Intent does not get picked up from the AndroidManifest.xml file so you have to assign it in code as shown above.  Also, I put the assignment in the onCreate method because the Service can get killed off.  If the Service is killed off, Android will schedule it to restart, but in order to catch the Screen Off broadcasts the Service must sign up again in the onCreate method…at least, this is what worked for me and all seems to be going well.  As always, the docs are a little sparse and I had to go through some trial and error to figure it out, but I’m pretty happy with the results.

The new feature (along with a bug fix) is available in both the Trial and Full version of MediaDroid in the Android market…check em out and let me know what you think!

I’m pretty excited about this…don’t remember how I found Nilvec, but thanks to a pair of blogs on their site I’ve been able to integrate dispatching of emails directly into Note To Me (this feature isn’t yet available for the version in the Android market) so the user doesn’t have to go through the Gmail client, very slick.  Check out these posts…

Sending Email Without User Interaction In Android

Email Sending Example

They packaged the Apache classes very nicely and made it easy to get the email set up and running.  Now for all the other features that are needed because I’m implementing my own email client…ie, making sure the emails are sent later if there is no wireless connection.