howdy, Julius

hello

heh me again...

I hope all is well with you

life is OK -- and you?

I read you're going to Singapore close to my neck of the woods but I can't really justify coming and saying hi. (mortgage and all)

I am well thank you

I've been reading your latest pdf versions. even tried them on the kindle app

wonderful

anywho

The Kindle app for Android reads PDFs?

so I don't take up too much of your time

oh no you have a mobi version I downloaded

ah, OK

there is a pdf reader but I'm not sure how good it is

I downloaded it when I got the flash

but haven't spent the time trying with it

too busy with work at the moment.

i was wondering with the title bar

I can set up a spinning wheel for indeterminate processes

I saw in k9 or some other applications that people have put some message next to it letting users know what is happening

o you know where I'd look to figure out how to do this?

well, the progress indicator is a window feature

equestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_PROGRESS);

er, rather: requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_PROGRESS);

in terms of a message next to the indicator, though, there are three possibilities I can think of:

yes I set that up before doing much in onCrerate

1. They just changed the title of the activity (setTitle())

2. They are using custom title View, which I tried once and failed to get working

(I thought about 2 and got a bit scared)

3. They disabled the title bar and just have the "title bar" as part of their activity, with a ProgressBar and TextView

oh right

I'll see if I can see if it's in the k9 code - I think it's open source

I'm pretty sure K9 is open source -- IIRC, they have it up on code.google.com somewhere

I have a couple of other questions if that's ok - not a big queue at the moment

go right ahead

I have noticed in some of the code for the android player that in the layouts they have an include statement (reusable component style)

uh... one second

I'll grab code to show you what I mean

<include layout="@layout/nowplaying" />

(eg.)

I've tried following this but I can't seem to get it to work.

Have you seen this efore?

(I'm wondering now whether it's sdk dependent)

I have used <include> statements in layouts, if that is what you mean

worked at least as of 1.5

possibly earlier

oh right well that's good

have you written about them anywhere?

(might save some code :))

no -- the one time I used it was on a consulting project

that's a Romain Guy blog post on the topic

kinda short, but perhaps it will be useful for you

oh sweet his stuff is great

I read about relative layouts to imrpove my list

ok I think the other things I am having trouble with I can figure out... :)

thank you for the pointers

sure, happy to help!

have a good trip if you're not already there. At some point I'll get on a plane to one of these meetups. NZ is just a bit out of the way for most people! :)

well, one of these days, I'll come up with an excuse to get down to your corner of the planet

do you watch rugby? World Cup next year is here... :)

no, sorry, not a big rugby fan

oh actually I did have one other question - I am downloading a file and sometimes the process stalls and I want to have some kind of way to respond to it so that the process throws an exception and life can go on.

ummm...was that a question?

I have a URLConnection which I open and an InputStream which I read.

sorry...

just trying to give you an idea of what I am doing an what I'd like to have happen

ok, keep going

just wondering - how do people deal with this kind of situation?

that's tough to answer in the abstract

would it help if I shouled you the code I'm using?

showed

is your concern that the InputStream blocks forever?

yes

there are some timeouts you can set, somewhere

(you have a great way of articulating things)

oh...

setReadTimeout()

and setConnectTimeout()

on URLConnection

right

just found that then thank you! :)

ok I'll leave you in peace thank you once again - apologies for the poor communication :)

oh, no problem -- it's a limitation of chats, that's all