Thought I’d through a question out the to all the Android Developers and ask: What syntax or parts of the development process do you always seem to forget or relearn?

I’ve got 3 that I always have to look up or when I try to debug what I’ve just done, it never seems to work the first (or second time).

1. The show() part of a Toast.

I get the,

Toast.makeText( this, “Some text”, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT )

but I just never remember the show() on the end.  Then I go and run the behavior and mull over it for 5 minutes before I finally remember.

2. Entering new Activities into the manifest file, at least this one gives you an error.

3. For whatever reason, I can never remember the Android reference syntax the first time.  Is it R.android.id or android.R.id…thanks to Eclipse code completion this isn’t to big of an issue.

So what always seems to stump you about the Android API or syntax??  Leave a comment or you can you this for fodder for your own blog.

(Updated 1/30/09 7:55am : corrected some grammar…syntax errors)

Guess I’m on a book “review” kick lately.  I wasn’t planning on posting back to back about the two Android books I’ve bought, but I just received my bound copy of “Hello, Android” by Ed Burnette the other day.  Call me old school, but I still prefer a bound book to a pdf.  I’ve had a pre-release pdf copy for a couple of months now, and wrote about it in a previous post, but just haven’t been able to bring myself to get all my thoughts down on “paper” till I got the actual book.  So here’s my take…
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I am by no means a very good critique and haven’t written a book report since high school, but I have wanted to write my impression so far of the book “Professional Android Application Development” by Reto Meier.  First let me say I have great respect for anyone willing to author a book on software development.  Just writing development posts for this blog has been a huge learning curve for me, I don’t pretend to be the best technical writer!

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FIRST POST OF 2009!!

Threw this Android Activity together really quickly to see if I understood the different ways of getting a web page to launch.  The first three examples perform the same functionality, the Linkify.addLink call builds a means of launching an Intent.ACTION_VIEW.  The fourth example loads the url into a WebView in the layout.

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Thought I’d throw down a wish list for things to have Google development, show up in the Android Market or just development myself.

1. Touch-Screen keyboard (come on Cupcake!)

2. Better workflow for Music Player

3. Support for AVI video playback

4. Access for developers to the Widget API

5. Better RSS reader

6. Ability to edit Contact Groups from my G1

7. Port of Spore to Android!!

8. PDF and EBook reader

maybe more to come later…any other ideas?

For any of you developers out there who aren’t on the mailing list and didn’t get the following email from Google about the Android Market, I thought I’d pass it on.

Hello,

Thank you for your participation in Android Market!

Since we launched a couple months ago, the team has been working on
several significant updates to Android Market. I’d like to let you know
about these upcoming changes and what they will mean to you and other
members of our developer community.

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Used a SimpleAdapter.ViewBinder the other day.  ViewBinders allow another way of attaching data to an Adapter.  I needed to capture an onClick event from a row in a ListActivity and fire a corresponding Intent to open a new Activity; basically mimicking the behavior of the API Demos Google provides in the Android SDK.

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I’ve been working through Ed Burnette’s book, “Hello, Andorid” and it’s given me a number of new tricks already; I’m only about a quarter of the way through.  One of the changes I made for my Android game Jumpy was to move the programmatic building of the menu to a menu.xml file instead, as Mr. Burnette describes in Chapter 3 of his book.

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With T-Mobiles data roaming issue out there for Android developers to worry about, it seems like programs accessing the web for data should be checking the DATA_ROAMING System Setting before they acquire their data.  The Activity below accesses and displays the result of the Setting.

I’m not a lawyer, but I do feel like I need to state that if your program still incurs roaming charges for the user, please don’t send them to me if you use this code bit.  Please thoroughly  test your code before you deploy!!  Just as a note, I had to install this on my G1 to test it because I couldn’t access the Setting directory from the Android Emulator.
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Wrote this real quick Android ListActivity to display the Resources from the android.R.drawable.  Not very pretty, but I just wanted something to display the images and show the associated Resource id.  Sorry in advance for any wacky formatting issues due to cutting and pasting from Eclipse into the WordPress editor.

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