The droidapps Blog

As a learning exercise, to get used to have a go at putting an android UI together I (matt) have been working on a File Browser.

Here’s a few screen shots of the nearly finished article:

No luck in the Android contest, but hey as we only had like 3 weeks to learn the platform and write the application, it wasn’t really unexpected. Congratulations to everyone who did make the top 50.
Looking forward to seeing some of the entries…

Browsing about and found this http://blip.tv/file/698098/

Each activity can have it’s own menu defined. Here’s a quick info on getting your menu up and running.

OptionsMenu event cycle

1. onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) - The point at which you should add all the items you need into the menu. Call the super inherited method to have the menu populated with the default items.
2. onPrepareOptionsMenu(Menu menu) - The point at which you can enable / disable and dynamic content, etc to respond to the state of the activity.
3. onOptionsMenuClosed(Menu menu) - called when the menu is closed.

When items are added to the Menu in OnCreateOptionsMenu you can either pass a runnable in at that point to associate with the menu item, or alternatively you can override the onOptionsItemSelected to provide a central place where you can call out to methods that the menu items invoke.

Other OptionsMenu methods

• openOptionsMenu() - Opens the OptionsMenu
• closeOptionsMenu() - Closes the OptionsMenu if open.

The droidapps blog is using Dean Lee’s Syntax Highlighting plug in for wordpress. http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/code_highlighter_plugin_for_wordpress/

Code is simply wrapped with <pre lang=”java”> </pre> and the plugin does the rest. It will syntax highlight various languages including javascript, php, c sharp

Craig and I (no relation despite the common surname) submitted an application into the Google Android Developer challenge. We only came across android about three weeks ago, and as we both have a full time job and families, it was a bit of a push to learn as much as we could about the platform and code an app in two weeks. It was a bit close to the wire, and we took full advantage of the time difference on day now known as “can’t type tuesday”. At about 3:30am we finally submitted the application, a Podcast down loader and player.

So the long wait ’till May 5th continues…. a 1 in 35 chance isn’t that bad…. is it?