howdy, Suzanne!

greetings from Dublin!

hi mark

dublin? is it cold there?

very

well, at least, very for Dublin

breaking 150-year-old records around here

Is it possible to start a time widget from a preferences screen? (in the middle of the cold)

time widget = TimePicker?

yes

there's no built-in preference for that, but creating a TimePreference as a DialogPreference subclass should be straightforward

so I have to subclass DialogPreference?

or start it from a menu or button?

Step #1: Subclass DialogPreference and override the right methods to put a TimePicker in the dialog and persist/restore the value

Step #2: Use your custom DialogPreference in your preference XML by fully-qualifying the class name

ok

See https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-colormixer

ok, thanks

next question ..

this is covered in a chapter of _The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development_

which chapter in advanced?

great !! okay, next question

do you have an example of a robust rest client service?

Um, not really

at least, not for any definition of 'robust' I'd use

or any rest client service?

well, you may recall the National Weather Service examples from the training

yes

those are in _The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development_

the weather API as a service has been reworked

do you mean, reworked in the chapter?

yes; unfortunately, the rework was in part to demonstrate an anti-pattern: forcing the activity to deal with the background thread

I say "unfortunately" because that exacerbates the lack of "robust"-ness

so we don't want to do that, right?

no, it'll generally be better to hide the threads in the service

one less thing to deal with on rotation events and other configuration changes

can I start with your example and build on it?

sure, I suppose

okay, good

I haven't written a REST client yet, so this will be an adventure

it's a bit tedious in Java

You might also check out Novoda's RESTClient, which is implemented as a content provider, IIRC

novoda? a content provider I can call?

yes -- and it's RESTProvider, not RESTClient

superb! I'll check it out and try to come to chat next week

to let you know how it's going

ok

you'll be on tuesday, right?

8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific

okay, i'll do my best to be there

happy holidays, in the meantime

likewise!

thanks. how long will you be in dublin?

another couple of days -- flying back Friday (barring weather-related trouble)

okay. thanks for the help, as always. I gotta run now, but tty next week

see ya~

er, ya~

er, ya!!!

(sheesh, I can't type today)

ya too! too cold to type

howdy, Alfred!

hi Mark

how can I help you today?

i have this one view that is simply not firing its onClick event!

there must be something ridiculously simple i am overlooking

maybe it's on vacation

:-)

i've set it android:clickable=true in the xml

i have an onclick listener...

it's driving me nuts

ok

can you give me a bit more to go on?

ummm... :-/

it's a simple LinearLayout

can you upload the XML to gist.github.com or something and link it here?

i even have it set up so that its background drawable shows that the click state

and it shows a clickstate

but just doesn't call my handler

OK, then maybe I'll need to see the Java

how are you registering for the click -- android:onClick, or setOnClickListener()?

the funny thing is... i swear i had it working some time ago

setOnClickListener

one possibility is that something else is in front of the LinearLayout -- you would use hierarchyviewer to help detect that

oh okay

another possibility is that you are calling setOnClickListener() on the wrong object accidentally

you might try switching to android:onClick and see if that helps, if you are not planning on supporting Android 1.5

okay

otherwise, I don't really have any advice based just on the symptoms you have listed here

howdy, brack!

Hi, sorry to join so late! How are you, Mark?

OK, and you?

howdy, Chris!

HI there.

brack: do you have a question?

great, minus the recent troubles with PVPlayer on Motorolas. have a quick question about that whenever you're availabkle

what is PVPlayer?

yeah- I'm using the standard MediaPlayer with streaming content. it works fine on my HTC G2, when seeking to an unbuffered position

but when on Motorola, seeking to unbuffered causes it to just ignore the seek outright.

PVPlayer is motorola's underlying media player. AwesomePlayer is HTC's (from what i can tell)

PVPlayer sounds like the plain PacketVideo OpenCORE stuff, maybe

they usually prefixed their stuff with PV

I don't know if I need to be doing some custom streaming and using a FileDescriptor with MediaPlayer, or what, but i was just generally curious

yeah, PacketVideo sounds familiar

do you have a third data point? in other words, is the G2 or the Motorola the odd case?

there's a ticket on it in google code, and it's been open for a while, doesn't seem very active

you mean b.android.com?

motorola is the odd case afaik, the AVD handles it well too

ok, then you probably should take it up with MOTODEV on the relevant support board

yes, b.android

they're pretty good about responding to inquiries

if you want, tell 'em I sent you their way... :-)

be sure to include the link and any samples you can provide

oh, that's awesome. thanks! any suggestion for trying a filedescriptor with streaming? Stitcher's app seems to seek to an unbuffered position just fine on moto

(link to the b.android.com)

yeah, i will do that

never used a FileDescriptor with streaming, so I have nary a clue

Chris: do you have a question?

cool, thanks Mark! appreciate it! have a nice night

Mark - Just signed up and admit I haven't read through the books yet :-( ... but I've been killing myself trying to figure out how to get a reference to a color in the current theme.

(I've been away from the code for a while, so I'm trying to reorient my brain some here... new to Android ...)

Chris: I'm not sure what you mean by "get a reference to a color in the current theme"

Mark: So my issue is that I can do something like "+@android/attr.textColor" in the XML but I can't figure out how to do it programmatically...

oh, beats me

So let me back up: What I want to do is highlight text (make it bold), but I want to get the "bold" setting from the current system theme instead of hard-coding it. Make sense?

um, bold is bold, AFAIK

it's a font thing

I didn't come to class prepared. :)

yeah, and unfortunately, the school bell is about to ring

FWIW, I have another one at a similar time slot on Thursday

My app doesn't have it's own theme - I'm using the system theme. From what I understand, different carriers have different default themes.

So I want to use android.R...textColor and ...textHighlight. I can do this in the XML, but not in code.

I can set an invisible widget to this in the XML and then query it for its values (I think) but not do it direct.

I'll be travelling Thursday but I'll get back to this in '11.

yeah, off the top of my head, I'm not quite sure how to solve that

sorry!

ok, thanks for your time.

I'll ask again when it bothers me enough. :)

OK

that's it for today's chat

next one is Thursday

have a pleasant day, everyone!

bye Mark