Know Anywhere
This very simple tutorial will add to your Android UI (user interface) development arsenal. How? Buttons that display as simple text or as images are basic elements of any application. By following the two steps below, these buttons can be easily created with Google’s Android by simply extending the current Button and ImageButton classes.
We will create these two new Button extensions as shown:
Continue reading ‘Android Tutorial #4.1: Image & Text-Only Buttons (UPDATED)’
Here’s a quick insight from research into the iPhone SDK in comparison to the Android OS.
Yes…you read this post’s title correctly. The iPhone SDK lacks the basic mapping API required by applications developers hoping to tie the mobile experience to a geo-specific location (GPS). The only GPS mapping function provided by the iPhone SDK is to send a URL to the iPhone’s built-in Google map application and to let Google handle the rest.
Curiously the iPhone SDK does provide a basic location service API providing the user’s location using cell signal triangulation, but without a map, this information is all-but-useless.
At first glance you might say, “that makes sense as the iPhone doesn’t have GPS built-in because it would have raised the price of an already expensive phone.”
Point taken but all this leaves me to believe that Apple’s take on the iPhone is too media focused and lacks clear understanding of the power provided by location-awareness. That’s great news for the upcoming GPS-enabled Android phones. They’ll have time to widely proliferate before the soon-to-be almost 10M iPhones out there will be replaced with GPS-enabled iPhones.
Imagine if Android had lacked the MapActivity API…?!? From my count, 90% of the most interesting Android Challenge entries would never exist. Without Android’s MapActivity API, we would be left with a few accelerometer-based games and non-SMS messaging apps.
This is great news for Google and perhaps that’s the point. Google wrote the iPhone’s map application and was either not given incentive to make expose its iPhone map through an API or perhaps decided it was smart to keep the iPhone limited in this crucial manner. OK…maybe Apple has a bigger plan as it always does. Maybe Apple is preparing to launch its own mapping application or perhaps AT&T didn’t want Apple to expose such location-based apps because AT&T has its own GPS agenda.
Thoughts anyone?
We were inspired by all the great videos presenting other Android-enabled applications being entered into Google’s Android Challenge so we created a short (4 minute) video about Pocket Journey.
NOTE: This tutorial was written for Android v1.0. I have just updated the Android streaming media player tutorial/code to v1.5 (Cupcake) with some additional information on the updated code. You should read that post as well as this one.
This is a long tutorial, but for those of you that have been struggling with streaming of .mp3 audio to Google’s Android’s MediaPlayer, then I hope this tutorial proves useful as you finalize your entries into Google’s Android Challenge
This tutorial will show how to roll your own streaming audio utility for Android’s MediaPlayer. We will buffer 10 seconds of audio and start playing that audio while the rest of the audio loads in the background. We store the streamed audio locally so you could cache it on device for later use or simply let it be garbage collected.
Here’s the source code for those that just want to jump in. You’ll also notice code for the other tutorials as I didn’t have time to strip them out.
Here are a few screenshots of what we’ll be creating:
Continue reading ‘Android Tutorial 3: Custom Audio Streaming with MediaPlayer’
