howdy, Evan!

hey Mark! great to be back

i have a more general question this time...

I'm going to be implementing (in the somewhat near future) a feature for our app (a video consumption app) that allows users to download our content to their device and play it from there

is there anywhere you might point me that discusses implementing this kind of feature?

like things to watch out for, recommendations for how to approach, etc

um

well, the basic technical details (doing downloads, playing videos) is covered in the books

hmm... i did see some stuff in the books

particularly the reading & writing files section of the first book...

"things to watch out for" would be dropped connections due to connectivity changes (e.g., moved away from WiFi and fell over to 3G) and device falling asleep mid-download

downloads would be in the Internet chapter, which is more focused on the Web service scenario rather than download-the-file

however, HttpClient has plenty of examples online

aha

video playback is in the Advanced Android book's Media chapter

yup i have that implemented already...

it's really more the downloading files and saving them to disk thing

and things like resuming interrupted downloads?

i've never tried anything like that... is that even possible (or does it require some special server-side configuration?)

again, that would be an HttpClient thing, if anything

okay

fair enough

awesome... thanks!

yo, Adrian!

lol! Hey! :)

Thanks again for the help Mark earlier.

I live a bit north of Philly, so I get to trot out the occasional Rocky reference

no problem -- sorry about Google's annoying OpenID setup

No worries, I get that ALL the time.

No worries.

yeah, I can imagine

how can I help you this evening?

I just was dropping by, lurking mostly. I usually read the transscripts via email, but wanted to see how this was.

ah

well, the traffic definitely varies

Actually, I did want to ask you for some advice, but its about Android work. vs. Android programming. NOt sure if this is the right venue for that or not.

:: shrug ::

go ahead

Mind if I ask then?

go ahead

I'm a freelance programmer, incorporated over ten years. I've been doing Java Swing work, RIA stuff mostly. Now I'm switching over to Android. I wanted to ask you for advice on the best avenues in getting work. Right now I just monstly go via dice.com and monster.com, etc.

Also any advice on beating the chicken vs. the egg situation (employers wanting 1+ years android work). I was going to try and create a few simple Android apps that show my knowledge off, and upload them on Git, and put that on my resume.

Hmmm...

You could try careers.stackoverflow.com

publishing some Android code is a good move

Ah, ok. Didn't realize they had a careers section.

yeah, they added it several months ago

Good to know.

it's the CV/resume counterpart to jobs.stackoverflow.com

How do you see the Android job market these days?

better than average

my primary metric is how many people are begging for help on LinkedIn and Craigslist

Good to know. Oh! Eclipse question. Which version do you use for day to day production work?

None of the above -- I'm not an Eclipse user

command line?

Komodo Edit and the command line do fine by me

Never heard of Komodo Edit. I'll have to take a look at it.

though I might look at IntelliJ IDEA CE edition when it reaches version 10 and has the Android plugin

yes

I'd avoid 3.6 for Android for now

Heard LOTS of good things about IntelliJ over the years.

Almost every project I'm on has someone using it and talking it up good.

Well, I'm going to get back to the fine Commonsware books. Thanks again for your help, and great product/service!

you are very welcome!

/waves

howdy, David!

hey there... looks like I'm egregiously early for your office hours.. I apologize

I thought the time was EDT and not PDT

no, it's been open for 35 minutes

ah I have to adjust my calendar then..

had two people earlier, asked questions and left

so I have a very in-depth question for you.. well.. more a vent about android.. you look at the AOSP very much?

bits and proverbial pieces

well.. I'll skip background and get to details.. as much as I can...

the samsung vibrant has a lovely bit of functionaltiy in it's dialer where you can assign speed-dial numbers to the dialpad of the phone.. I thought it was part of 2.1/2 and found that not to be the case.. so I thought I'd 'simply' roll a new dialer based on the AOSP (simply being relative of course)... (cont)

when I was playing with trapping the android.intent.action.CALL_BUTTON action on the G2 I noticed something.. that the "call" button in the launcher didn't, in fact, fire that intent off.

so.. I went off into the android source and looked at launcher2...

and I found that in the Launcher.java activity they refer to a config file that actually - for lack of any other way to describe it - 'hard configures' the 'call' button on the home screen to fire off contacts

;component=com.android.contacts/.ContactsLaunchActivity

do you have any idea why Google would do this to developers... other than that they hate us?

"hate" is such a strong word

perhaps...

ok.. how about "they have severe disdain for us"?

you appear to be conflating two issues

first, I would not expect that icon to fire android.intent.action.CALL_BUTTON

really? ok ...

that would be for a hardware button

on devices that have it

but the browser button does fire an intent.

so I see that as an inconsistency

oh, I'm not questioning whether the dialer icon should fire an Intent, just not that one

ah.

which intent would you see it fire?

ACTION_DIAL with a null Uri, perhaps

frankly, I haven't thought about that much

but the other _BUTTON actions are for hardware buttons (CAMERA_BUTTON, MEDIA_BUTTON)

fair enough

I see your point.

hence, I would not expect an icon to fire a _BUTTON Intent

now, I would agree with you that there should be a standard for "implement this and become a replacement dialer"

yea the browser button actually fires ACTION_VIEW with a category of CATEGORY.BROWSABLE and a default URI

tactically, though, even if Launcher2 did use that, without it being in the CDD/CTS, other devices might not honor it

and third-party home screens are free to ignore it entirely

hence, fixing the Launcher2 component-tied Intent would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for you to be able to implement what you want widely

OTOH, if you implement your own home screen, you can do whatever you want

so.. I'll make a new dialer where I can assign speedial entries.. and then I'll make a launcher with less lameness in it too.. ;)

or, create the new dialer and work to integrate it with popular third-party home screens

your dialer could still be launched by a desktop shortcut

yea.. but I rather like launcher2 overall...

yea I know.. but what fun is that if there's already space for a shortcut right there.. :-)

but I see your points completely

replacement dialers have been a long-standing area of contention

you're not the first to gripe, and you probably won't be the last, unless they magically change things in Gingerbread

I would have thought after all this time they would have at LEAST added speed-dial entires like the Vibrant did.

I suspect they're thinking the OEMs will be replacing the dialer more often than not

the rumored UI improvements in Gingerbread *might* cover this sort of thing

probably.. the Vibrant was very much turned into an "iPhone-like" experience with Touchwiz, etc

after all, the claims were they wanted to eliminate the need for MOTOBLUR, Sense, Rachael, TouchWiz, etc.

their claims USED to be they encouraged FreshFace, BLUR, Sense, etc.. ;) I guess that came back to bite them..?

it fuels the fragmentation fears

BTW, what is FreshFace?

oh it's a Homescreen replacement on the market..

for 1.6

ah

very slick but a resource pig

I don't think they have problems with Market home screen apps

those will be niche products

and indeed (on the fragmentation fears)... Motorola still hasn't released a 2.1 for the Cliq...

compared to a million handsets here and a million handsets there

right.

does anyone ever try to 'refactor out' the dialer in AOSP into another app? just curious more from an academic perspective.

seems like an enormous undertaking to simply build one from scratch

well, most of those apps rely on non-SDK classes

right. internal APIs that could change with the next release..

I'm not sure which is more enormous: writing one from scratch or trying to rip out all the non-SDK references

oh what fun

I'd almost bet the latter.

anyway.. it's coming up on the end of office hours for you.. I appreciate your time talking about this.

wouldn't surprise me

hey, no problem

it's been an unusual chat overall :-)

heh.. well I like to come to the table with unique topics.. :)

otherwise I figure I'm probably wasting people's time.

have a good evening sir... and thank you.

happy to help!