Hi Mark, how are you?

howdy!

how can I help you today?

I haven't done much research on this but I wanted to know if it's possible to change the overall "tint" of the wallpaper for android devices

only if you create your own wallpaper

or your own home screen

ie, is there a way to give the current background a reddish hue (or any other color) while still maintaining the image

could i overlay one image on top of another?

in order to achieve this effect?

only if you create your own home screen

the home screen displays the wallpaper

how would i go about creating my own home screen?

you could create an app widget to give a tint to a piece of the wallpaper, I suppose

Hello there

that depends on how usable of a home screen you want

Hi Brent

I see

(BTW, howdy, Brent -- be with you in a moment)

k

all a home screen is, in the end, is an activity responding to ACTION_HOME

I see

but supporting wallpaper and app widgets and a launcher and shortcuts and... is a whole lotta work

I'm already modifying the background with existing images. I just wanted to find out if I could add a transparent image on top

for your own images in your own app, sure

for the home screen's wallpaper, only if you are the home screen

I see

so it's possible to overlay my existing images with other images?

(wall paper images)

sure

use a RelativeLayout or FrameLayout

they both support Z-axis ordering

later children appear to float over top earlier children

and if the ones higher in the Z-axis have transparency, Android will do the blending for you

I see

let me swing over to Brent for a bit, and I'll come back to you shortly

Brent: do you have a question?

ok

yep

The first one: is there a way to populate the action bar navigation spinner without having the onSelect fire?

sure

it doesn't fire by default, AFAIK

hmmm

oh, no, wait

memory fuzzy

no, you're right, I think it does fire

in which case, no, I doubt you can avoid it

In my experience, it is defaulting to the initial item

regular Spinners always fire their onItemSelectedListener()

I would expect that nav Spinner to do the same

The reason why I ask is that I'm doing a file explorer app with a viewPager

you can always rig up a boolean to skip the first selection event

and I wanted to use the action bar spinner to hold the parent folder heirarchy

but that needs to be updated with every swipe to a different page of the viewpager

thing is, I already have the listviews populated

again, short of using a boolean to say "oh, never mind" to the first selection event, I think you're stuck

That may be fine

now, I haven't played with the breadcrumbs stuff, so it's possible that's a better solution here

I'm not even sure what they look like

I just remember seeing them mentioned in the SDK related to the action bar

I've seen them too

one of the many nooks and crannies that I need to poke at one of these months...

didn't think they made as much sense though for my purposes

I'm trying to keep the action bar down to one row

Tawanna: do you have another question, or a follow-up to your first question?

yes

currently, i have a wall paper instance and i'm simply changing the background with that

are you saying it's as simple as adding another image on top of the existing image?

(a transparent image)

well, a translucent image

right

if you want to have a color effect applied

it doesn't even need to be an image

it could be a View with a background of the desired tint

okay, thanks!

Brent: did you have another question?

Yeah

Let me start by asking whether you're familiar with "split action modes"

like the one in the gmail/email apps

yes

well, actually, split action *bars*, yes

haven't tried combining a split action bar with an action mode yet

though I should soon

:: makes a note ::

Ok, well my problem is that, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get an action mode to flow onto the bottom line as in the split action bar

Cant find any documentation at all

yeah, action modes are kinda flaky

and the only related information that I could dig up was a reference to the "actionModeSplitBackground" attr in android.R

meaning when you use the action mode, it only affects the top bar?

Meaning that when the action mode comes up, there would be two bars, one covering the top action bar, and the other coverning the bottom split action bar.

it's conceivable that Gmail is cheating and not using a real action bar there

but I would hope that it would be possible

The email app does it too

yeah, I don't have that one configured

so I may just need to dig around in the source

that's what I'd do

k

though that's more annoying now that Google Code Search is gone

:: sob ::

yeah...

I made a half hearted attempt at downloading aosp the other day, but the tutorial seemed to be geared towards unix/linux users

which puts me out of luck

yeah, Windows needs Cygwin

the next-best browsing option is http://github.com/android

I even did that, but perhaps I didn't have things configured correctly/completely

Oooo! I'll take it.

looking at the Email app manifest, EmailActivity has the normal splitActionBarWhenNarrow, and it's the only activity that does

so I'd poke around in that class and see how they're setting up their action mode

excellent

I didn't know they had the source on github

so this will make things much easier

the biggest thing the GitHub solution lacks is a cross-repo search option

Tawanna: do you have another question?

no

thanks for your help!

OK

Brent: do you have another question?

I've got another one for you

Is there a way for me to lay out my action bar such that the navigation spinner fills up all space not taken by the home icon and some other element positioned to the right?

go right ahead

I would think that would be governed by the Adapter you are using and the Views it returns

try using match_parent for the width for the Views and see if that does the trick

(or the equivalent depending on the structure of your Views)

I've tried that, and it doesn't work

or rather, applying that to the spinner items doesn't work

And it's not like I'm using my own views for the action bar

for the navigation spinner, you are

perhaps what I should be doing is use a custom view?

I am surprised that it doesn't work

I would expect a flexible width to fill up the available space

then again, I've never tried it

:: makes note of another experiment to run ::

I've set attributes on the spinner items just fine. For now, I just have them set to a certain width, which widens the parent spinner

but I don't think those items have any notion of their parent's parent

if the action bar shows up in Hierarchy View, I'd poke around in there and see what it tell you

which is why match_parent doesn't work

I'm not sure I understand

Hierarchy Viewer allows you to browse all the widgets and containers in a foreground activity

Interesting

I haven't had the chance to use that befor

if the action bar and its nav spinner are part of what Hierarchy Viewer displays, you can find out what the layout rules are

and see if that gives you clues for how to structure your Spinner views

if specifying a concrete width does expand the nav spinner, then there has to be some way to get it to fill all available space

sounds good

it's just a matter of figuring out what

which I'll poke at this weekend

Much appreciated

Love your books btw

thanks!

They are so much better at explaining things than googles dev resources

well, for some stuff

there are lots of things the official docs cover (at least somewhat) that I haven't touched yet

I've found them to be especially helpful in understanding view/fragment lifecycles

that's interesting, considering I think that's one of the weakest things I have in there

getting a substantial rewrite as part of The Big Book Reboot

Never hurts, but I found it to be a bit simpler than Google's stuff

I was learning all of this while messing with fragments inside a fragmentPagerAdapter, so I had no idea what was going on

yeah, I'm actually only starting to play with ViewPager myself

Its pretty fun stuff

I'm making an attempt to have my app adhere as much to ICS design language as possible

not a bad paln

er, plan

what they're missing are instructions on how exactly to pull all that design stuff off

I noticed that

on the plus side, that opens up all sorts of possibilities for upcoming book material

I did appreciate their new design section though

oh, to be certain

I think thats the big thing android devs are missing these days

the mere fact it *exists* is a huge improvement

Lots of programmers out there, but no designers

if either of you come up with another question, feel free to chime in

Here's one: What kinds of things are the biggest culprits for memory leaks? I've done a little bit of reading on how assets can be leaked in between orientation changes, etc... but are there others?

I have some material on that in _Tuning Android Applications_ in your Warescription

static data members and/or custom Application objects are one

Ah. Well I'll just make sure to look that over then.

I haven't been able to make it all the way through the 3rd and 4th books yet

still pouring through the first two

well, the Tuning book is certainly a work in progress

stalled right now in favor of more Advanced Android material plus The Big Book Reboot

Is the reboot geared more towards an overall deepening of the content, or are you looking to expand more on current weak points/ICS stuff?

have you read the blog posts?

mostly, it's a matter of too much new core material that I can't just slap on the side of the book

I need to present fragments, the action bar, loaders, and so on from the outset

which pretty much necessitates a complete reorganization of the material

I'll have to look those over. Didn't know about the blog before

I'm also rebuilding my publishing toolchain, emphasizing the digital editions over the print ones

I look forward to it

yeah, so do I

that whole million monkey/million typewriter strategy doesn't work so well

I keep getting copies of Shakespeare

:-)

haha

just reading over : "Though I may pull action modes into the main trail someday" Not sure if you know or not, but Jake started with that on the 13th of this month. Hoping for RC1 of v4 sometime soon

(referencing ActionBarSherlock)

Love that library

agreeed

give or take an e

I still will probably keep action modes and context menus in a trail versus the core

That makes sense

I'm trying to keep the core relatively short and sweet

They aren't as common as other things

Well from what I just read, I think you have an excellent plan in mind

I hope so

That organization structure sounds very natural

In fact, that is similar to how I ended up reading your books

yeah, when you start focusing on hyperlinked media vs printed pages, things flow better

when I started the books, I thought print and the digital editions would have comparable sales volume

I did the first couple of chapters and then started skipping between the basic and advanced books, from fragments to action bars to menus

the digital editions swamp the print ones

so, I may as well optimize for my reader base

Yeah.

I was tempted to buy the print copies, since they're easier to physically read, but copying and pasting and the promise of any updates was too great

you're welcome to print out portions if you feel that will be useful

no DRM to block it

No printer :(

well, now, that would be a limiting factor

Although that is still appreciated

I do well enough for now

Having two monitors helps

I have one in portrait with the book, and eclipse in the other

Well, it looks like its getting to be that time of evening. Thanks for your help. I'll make sure to cook up some new ones for later.

*new questions*

OK

next chat is Thursday, 10am Eastern

I have your class schedule added to my calendar widget ;)

See you then.

have a pleasant day!