howdy scottt

hello!

how can I help you today?

polishing off my mini app and have a generic sort of question...

my app yet another stopwatch kind of thing (that scratche a personal itch)

i've found the delay before text-to-speech starts playing announcements (even after chunking it into small pieces) is too long

so i want to play a small chime or other announcement ringtone sort of thing

any recommendations on the lightest-weight way of doing it?

um

if a simple beep will do, try ToneGenerator

otherwise, I'm not sure if either MediaPlayer or SoundPool is significantly "lighter weight" than the other

ok. i plan to play the small chime to "mark the time" before playing the tts

AudioTrack is the lightest, but it may not be convenient for you to have the audio clip in 8- or 16-bit PCM

no, probably not

i considered obtaining pre-recorded voice prompts for all the digits etc to get from 1 to 100

I'd be happy to provide a dramatic reading of the number 57 :-)

but didnt want to pay much for a toy app. and i got a bit confused trying to figure out the licensing for some open source ones (like in asterisk)

lol

howdy, fitz!

Hello - just here to observe - for now :)

OK

if either of you have a question, just chime in

ok

the next big challenge is trying to create an icon that adheres to google's guidelines

launcher icon

yeah, the instructions are definitely designed for graphic designers, or at least people who speak Photoshop

Well, Android doesn't have the RMI classes

and you cannot readily add java.* classes to an Android app

you could attempt to grab the code from Harmony (assuming they have it) and refactor it into your own package

ok will look at that thanks

i finally got around to doing a market search for "stopwatch" and found there were 250+, so i have no illusions as to whether anyone would want mine. i've done mine to solve a personal need and because it's conceptually simple (so that i could concentrate on learning the platform)

there are lots of reasons to write apps; distributing them on the Market is only necessary for a subset of those reasons

switching gears: i just picked up a very discounted ebook for doing native game ports. the author shows how to do it for all version back to 1.0 using code sourcery. and says he shows how to do stuff the ndk one in an appendix

do you touch on the ndk much in any of the books?

_Pro Android Games_?

yeah, that one

The NDK is covered in _Android Beyond Java_, with that material scheduled to move into _Tuning Android Applications_ once I get all this Honeycomb stuff behind me

it's very dated, but i figure the core concepts would still be the same

it's not terribly deep

(it's being my NDK coverage)

I haven't done serious C/C++ development in over a decade

so if I am on same network as windows box - can I have a droid talk to PC and transfer files? or is this a pipe-dream

not via cable - via wifi

fitz: sure, but Android is mostly just providing an HTTP client, if that

the server piece, wherever that would reside, is up to you

and, if an HTTP client is not what you want, you may have to hunt around for something that will work

(my background is mostly c/c++/nix, with forays into a zillion other things as need/whim present themselves)

back after reboot

howdy, Chris!

Hey. I don't have any questions.

Um, OK

So you can skip me.

well, right now, there aren't many questions, so it's a free for all

if something pops in mind, just ask

may have said so in a previous chat, but the latest flex stuff looks interesting. if adobe can get the reliability/resource-usage up to speed

OK, I haven't had time to do any programming lately, but I'm working on a little project now. I just figured I'd pop in to see what's going on.

is Flex able to run on Android? I seem to recall that they said 'no' originally

i saw some stuff where their latest flex builder can package APKs

yeah, the tools can do it, but I was under the impression that Flex itself (mx.* and the mxmlc stuff) was too big

but I haven't tuned back into that in several months

ID

IDK

seems like i saw some recommendations not to use much exception handling in android, but also saw other guidelines that contradicted that. your thoughts?

well, you want something to serve as the top-level exception handler

that can either be the built-in "force close" dialog or something else

the key is to get those stack traces sent to you by one means or another

if you want to rely on the Android Market's error reporting, letting the built-in "force close" do its thing should be fine

otherwise, look at error-reporting libraries like ACRA or full analytics packages like Flurry (which often also support this sort of error tracking)

ok

Anyone know why when I have the Android emulator (2.2) in airplane mode I get an error that says I can't access web pages due to no internet connection, but the pages load up anyways?

never tried airplane mode on an emulator

ok, i was just trying to simulate what would happen with no connection.

sounds like a reasonable way to test it, but wouldnt expect it to load anything (unless it's falling back to cache)

yeah, the first page gives the error but loads. then i can browse any page after that with no error. oh well, i can test on my real device

kind of a quite session. <chirp> <chirp>

yeah, these tend to run hot and cold

besides, everybody's busy playing Angry Birds Rio

yeah, but just having them available is very useful

yeah, i finally succumbed to the hype and downloaded the free Angry Birds app for Android

it's as addictive as people say

usually when I have a question, i can find the answer in Mark's books. so that's a good thing :)

i'm still on the first set

i kind of feel bad, cuz i rearely come here with an actual question from his books

well, these chats aren't only for book-related questions -- anything on Android development is fair game

I only limit the question topics on the [cw-android] Google Group

cool. cuz i've been treating them that way

so how much of the hoenycomb/fragments/etc stuff is useful if you're not targeting 3.0 devices specifically?

well, fragments are also supported by the Android compatibility library

so, if you're looking to use fragments to consolidate what are several activities on a phone into a single activity on a tablet, fragments would be the way to go

with the compatibility library, fragments work back to 1.6

i was totally just ignoring the hc stuff until i realized their was utility for older devices too

(i went back and looked a bit more after a previous one of these sessions)

looks like it's about time, so i'll sign off now. have a great one!

thanks Mark. I'll try to have a real question next time.

heh, ok

have a pleasant day!