howdy, lajos!

hi Mark!

i really enjoy the books

thanks!

got me up to speed quick

i actually have a tricky problem

haha

go ahead!

i saw you commented on something similar on the google android group

basically i need a portrait view on top of camera

and camera needs to be landscape

yeah, that's probably not going to be possible

what specifically is in the "portrait view"?

i rigged something up but it's not perfect

the UI

basically we need to record portrait video

which is not the issue i have all tat covered

but i need the ui on top of it to be portrait

which i also have an almost working solution for

hold one let me turn on my laptop i'll tell you what i did

eclipse takes some time to start ;(

one of the many reasons I don't use it

so basically i extended a framelayout

oh i hate it so much

but i'm new to android so the completion helps a lot and the help

so basically i have a rotatedframelayout

in dispatchdraw i rotate the canvas

in dispatchtouchevent i recalculate the toucesh

all works fine

except

the ui uses all sorts of redraw optimizations

so when i click a button, that is the whole width of the screen, only the part of it updates that overlaps where it would be without rotation

if that makes sense

sounds a bit like how the animation framework behaves

not terribly surprising

i can of course force redraw the whole view

yeah it's not surprising

but i wonder if you have an idea as to how to automatically force redraw

I'd run away screaming

haha that's what i did when i spent a day working on it

unfortunatelly this is a requirement for the app we are developing

you might take a peek at how the animation framework works, to see if you get any ideas

but I have nary a clue how you'd pull off doing what you're trying to do in an efficient fashion

are you sure the camera has to be landscape? I thought they might have fixed that limitation

no at least not on droid2

even if you look at layar, you can see that the camera is running landscape

you can see the shadow from the hidden toolbar on the right side of screen

what sorts of UI stuff is going in your, um, RotatedFrameLayout?

i guess i could try to create a surface view that rotates the data from the camera

but that also sounds painful

well, record button, options button, not a lot of stuff

why do those need to be "portrait"?

if they're ImageButtons, just rotate your icons

it's the nature of the app

we need to record in portrait

basically standing figures

so?

what precisely is the difference between portait and landscape with rotated icons?

the issue is that the camera activity requires to be locked into landscape

so?

but since we have a requirement to do portrait only recording, it would be funny if the ui would be landscape

you're missing the point

oh i guess i see what you are getting at

just rotate the buttons and render them in landscape

right!

allow Android to consider the UI to be landscape, but have the stuff *in* the UI have rotated contents to compensate

easy enough for icons

probably not too bad for text

sounds good

why did i not think of that haha

gets icky if you need things like EditTexts or something

maybe cause i was trying to muscle a portrait view on top

no we don't need that thank god

awesome thanks for the idea

what do you use for development? just a simple text editor?

not sure about "simple", but, yes, just a text editor

Komodo Edit, presently

Used to be a jEdit fan, but that project seems to have run out of steam

if I were a Mac user, I'd probably be on TextMate

i used komodo in the past

i also use jedit for small stuff

the only reason i put up with eclipse is the built in help and copletion

understood

i tried intellij but it looks terrible on linux

one nice thing about eclipse is that it also does a little bit of c

and having to do a jni backend, that comes in handy

makes sense

ok i won't bore you with stuff like that

been playing a bit with JNI/NDK recently, for the _Android Beyond Java_ book

thanks again for the suggestion

no problem, happy to help!

thanks

jni is cool, but the ndk-build system is tricky

i feel that it lacks documentation

so your book will be a lot of help to people

so they don't have to take the hard road like me ;)

possibly -- it's been a really long time since I fussed around with C/C++

I'll be presenting the information in a different fashion, which may help

but I'm not getting into all sorts of makefile trickeration or anything

i've been doing bunch of iphone work, so i got the c part

but the build system is tricky

getting Lua going as an interpreter via the NDK is as far as I'm taking it for now

i like that they made it easy, at least easy once you get your head around it

well that's a big enough bite

we are using ffmpeg backend

compiling that was a nightmare

haha

yeah, I can see where that would not be pleasant

actually it's like ndk-build - once you figure it out it's easy

but the figuring out part is rocky

ok thanks again

i have to go help with baby bedtime

happy to help!

have a pleasant evening!

and tell baby I said "goo!"

good nite (or i guess it might be afternoon for you)

haha thanks!

talk to you later