Morning Mark, so I have two more questions since Tuesday.

howdy, EGHDK!

(sure wish this chat would "ding" when somebody entered the room...)

go ahead with your first question

First one, is that I am using dates/calendar a lot. So I have a Calendar.MONTH which gives me an int, but now I want to display it to the user as a string (March, April, May...) whats the best way to do that?

off the cuff, probably SimpleDateFormat

I feel like I can hard code it and have a whole bunch of if statements but I feel like there could be an easier way

yeah, even Google's former alternative has been deprecated in favor of SimpleDateFormat

the fourth one, using "MMMM" as the format, is probably what you want

bonus: it's already locale-aware, and hence will return proper names based on the device language

What was google former alternative?

the DateUtils class has a getMonthString() method

deprecated in API Level 17

and, frankly, not that much simpler than SimpleDateFormat

Hmm... interesting. Alright cool.

So wait, I'm originally starting with a unix timestamp, is there any way to convert that to "March 21, 2013" lets say?

again, SimpleDateFormat

standard Java stuff

Still got to pick me up a java book.

well actually I picked up head first.

Just haven't read it through yet.

Alrighty, second question. I looked at your tutorial for Reverse chronometer. Works great actually.

Let me tell you how I'm implementing it, so let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

I have a listview, and every list item has this chronometer

(hello, Emmanuel -- I will be with you shortly!)

In getView that when I do the setting of the time. and then chorno.run()

So that works fine.

ok thanks

But in your book, your example says to pause or stop in onPause or onStop I think.

Do I have to do that at all?

you pause when you want the countdown to pause

you stop when you want the countdown to stop

the business rules for that are up to you

Okay, I never want them to pause or stop

But I thought the timer might keep running if I exit the activity or something.

and get a memory problem somewhere.

there is no timer

the implementation should use postDelayed(), if I am not mistaken

and that *will* keep running until the activity is destroyed

Okay, so I shouldl be good to go then.

that's part of the reason for the pause and stop recommendations

Great.

once the activity is no longer in the foreground, it can go *poof* at any point

if you need to maintain timing information when you are not in the foreground, you will need to do so persisetntly

I maintain it persistenly.

OK

And I grab that persistent time when I set the time to the chrono

Emmanuel: your turn! do you have a question?

But I thought maybe I have to stop the chorno when it gets off of the listView. But it seems I do not.

EGHDK: the row will be recycled, and you will have to address that

yes I do

I do. But, again. I don't have to call stop on the chronometer correct?

Emmanuel: go right ahead

I was playing around with Fragments

I created a custom row

so I can use with a ListView

this row contained and ImageButton and some TextView

s*

the problem is that it seems that the ImageButton "steals" the focus of the row

and it makes it non clicable

clickable*

there is some recipe for dealing with this, though I forget the details

I tried every way possible to make the ImageButton non focusable

I ended up removing the ImageButton and using an ImageView

and it worked perfectly

I even tried to switch to ListFragment

this has nothing to do with fragments

tried both of them...

then I cannot help you further, sorry

personally, I avoid this scenario

my question was if this is considered a bug?

(other than the one RatingBar book sample, and there I do not care about clicks on rows)

I cannot answer that

again, I disagree with the approach

oh

ImageButtons or ImageViews in rows are a nono?

it's more that widgets inside of an AdapterView should not themselves be focusable/clickable

independently of the row itself

ohhh

now, not everyone agrees with me, including Google, who uses their little "..." stuff in their cards in places like the Play Store app

right

but I do not know the technique for getting that to work

but what you are saying makes sense

and I cannot quite fathom how I'd get accessibility working in the Play Store scenario

for "sub-actions" in a ListView row, I would use a contextual action bar

I will have to look into that

long-press to bring up the contextual action bar (a.k.a., action mode), where the user can perform operations on selected items

but, that may not be appropriate in all scenarios either

lol

my overall point is: I don't know the answer to your question, sorry

no problem, thanks

EGHDK: do you have another question?

OK, if anyone has a question, go ahead

have you played with BLE?

if you mean Bluetooth Low-Energy, no

yeah

ohh ok

this might be off-topic, but have you ever considered stopping by the Android chat room in SO?

(not for tech support, just to hang out)

you probably have no time...

went there a bit after they opened it up

oh

I elected to draw the line at keeping chats something just for subscribers

I see

so I do not do SO chats, whether per-answer or the topic-specific rooms

we get the privilege, lol

fair enough

have you played with Arduino/Android stuff for home automation?

When I have an outside class that does something, but it needs a context, and I call that method from an activity, I usually just pass in "this" as an arguement. Should I not pass in this since it's an activity and thats pretty big? Should I just take the activities context and do that instead since context is a "smaller" object than "activity"?

(by stuff I mean gadgets that involve both platforms)

Emmanuel: no, I have not done much of anything dealing with connecting Android devices to accessories, outside of a couple of wearables

(hello, codeMagic, be with you shortly!)

EGHDK: there is no "activities context"

What happens when I pass in `this`

Activity inherits from Context

Hello, all! Ok, Mark M.

hence, Activity is a Context

an Activity instance is not smaller than itself

just as 1 is not smaller than 1

this is a reference to an object, an instance of some class

Should I be using this (activity) to pass into a method?

typically that is fine

I believe I pointed you to http://www.doubleencore.com/2013/06/context/ last time

Okay, I just feel like I'm passing this huge monolithic activity sometimes, and that it may be causing a memory issue.

there are certain circumstances when you need to choose certain Context implementations

That link is amazing, everyone should read it!

Java is pass-by-reference for objects, not pass-by-value

Yeah, like getAppContext for DB if I want to be thread safe.

you are not copying the Activity instance

Mark M, I think Java is "pass by value, which is pass by copy"?

codeMagic: do you have a question?

(EGHDK: absolutely incorrect)

Damn Head First Java has me confused.

I mostly wanted to check it out as I just signed up for your subscription

ah, OK

mostly, it's live Q&A

you are certainly welcome to just hang out

Actually, do you have any printing experience with the new framework?

but that's not really the role

Ok, is it alright to stop by and see what people are asking?

not yet, though that's comparatively high on my todo list

Ah, ok

the downside of joining the chat just to lurk is that, AFAIK, you are not seeing the transcript of what went on before you arrived

I post all transcripts to http://commonsware.com/office-hours/ as well

I need to implement printing and been having hard time with with USB and the Brother SDK though got WIFi to work fine

so, you do not need to join the chat just to see what people are asking

Nope, don't see what was before just since I joined

EGHDK: only for primitives (int, float, double, boolean, etc.)

Thanks for the transcript link

EGHDK: Java is pass-by-reference for objects

Okay, maybe I should read further into the book... HAH

codeMagic: yeah, that's one of the limitations of Campfire

Maybe theres a twist like you say...

EGHDK: well...

it depends a bit on what you consider "value" to be

most people would consider pass-by-value for an object to mean "make a copy of the object"

a pedantic definition would be more like "well, we are making a copy of the pointer to the memory location, so it is pass-by-value"

and so you wind up with stuff like http://stackoverflow.com/a/73021/115145

and that may be what the book is saying

if anyone has a question, chime in

When you get to the printing framework, where should I look for your info on that, your blog?

I plan to dig into it soon as I need a printing solution and it looks interesting

I doubt I'll be blogging about it

it will turn up in a book update eventually

But I imagine you might get further faster than me

Ah, ok

well, since I am not working on printing right now, you have a significant head start

Unfortunately, there isn't much about it yet with it being so new. But I'm sure I will figure something out when I get time to dig in

printing is one of those things I need to get to, but it's a long list :-)

Undersanable, I know how that is

also, since it's mostly KitKat-only, it's not a super-high priority until there are more KitKat devices

(and, no, the candy bars don't count)

:)

(unless they have a working "Print" button... :-)

Are you planing in adding an OpenGL ES 2.0 chapter to the book?

Emmanuel: no, as there are whole books on that subject

I couldn't do it justice

ohh ok. I started reading one that is specific to Android, but wondered if you were going to add something later. Ok.

the big challenge for me this year is yet another book overhaul, to deal with Android Studio/Gradle and a pivot to API Level 14 as a foundation (e.g., de-emphasize ActionBarSherlock)

and, since I have no idea when Android Studio is going to sufficiently stabilize, I have some difficulty planning my year

are you always going to support Eclipse?

or eventually you are going to move completely to AS?

I'll support it as long as Google is

ok

Ant support will fade out, as that will be replaced totally by Gradle

right

and I expect Google to punt on Eclipse support eventually

I believe so, but some people think they will support Eclipse for ever...

most of the book, outside of the tutorials, is fairly IDE-agnostic

yeah

those are the same people that thought Google would support Google Reader forever... :-)

LOL

anyway, that's a wrap for today's chat

the transcript will be posted to http://commonsware.com/office-hours/ shortly

see you later. Thanks.

Thanks for letting me stop in and hang out. I look forward to your memory talk at AnDevCon

the next chat is Tuesday at 4pm US Eastern Time

codeMagic: you and me both! :-)

have a pleasant day!

you too

You also. Thanks