Hello Mark

howdy, Dimitri!

how can I help you today?

On Monday 11/4 we were discussing a problem hab loading 2*7 listview in a 2 TabHosts...

Ive manage to read up and use view instead of activities as you describe in your books and mentioned in our chat.

However i am not quite sure how to implement part of you suggestion...

Having an onClick Button to view return result would starts a TRipActivity each time... so when hitting back

button , depending on the users clicks i will have to reload many times the same activity. To my knowledge hijacking the back button is not a good idea?

Dimitri: I fail to see the problem

(btw, howdy, fitz and scottt)

hello! I'm just lurking today

fitz: do you have a question?

Is there a way to 'load' the activity "only" twice i.e. once for oneway and once for return trips.

?

Dimitri: you can play some games to make it behave that way (e.g., hijacking the BACK button, as you phrased it)

but, again, I fail to see the problem

sorry had to take a call

no problem

do you have a question?

on a side note: our new android developers group, with only 1 mtg so far, is up to 35 members and 13 that say they'll attend the next mtg. pretty encouraging.

page 158 or tutorials book - rss feeds - having fun getting the RSS to work - where or how do I get the org.mcsoxford.rss info to inport for eclipse

might be page 165 - in that area

See Step #6: Install the RSS Library, page 168

particularly the "you can download a JAR from this URL" phrase

"this URL" is a link to the JAR for downloading

ok - will do I am just getting into it so thought I missed a step

cool

scottt: is your group a GTUG, or an Android group?

so you said in past there is now way to query google calendar right or search calendar for specific data right - limitation from google

fitz: there's no documented and supported way to access on-device calendar information

it's android: http://www.meetup.com/Tampa-Bay-Android-De…

and the same with docs or email just contacts correct?

scottt: I'd say "cool", but I am guessing that "cool" is not a valid adjective for the Tampa area right now

fitz: I don't know what "docs" are in terms of Android. Email is just contacts -- nothing documented/supported to access Gmail or email messages

83F, sunny, windless at the moment

ya that would be google docs - so anything accessed via web portal for google from a PC, you can not really access an search on android, at least all the google stuff - kinda limiting EH!

you're supposed to be able to access their respective GData APIs

last weekend it showed in the low hills here in the east bay in San Fran area - go figure ...

there's an I|O conference session on that

snowed :) typing is off today

maybe I should take the day off ...

i'm sure promising a commonsware subscription (obtained via bug bounty) as a door prize helped drive interest

hmmm ya did not get signed up fast enough for I|O

scottt: OTOH, you're going to get slapped with a truth-in-advertising suit if you don't start giving away actual doors :-)

fitz: it might be streamed live (not sure which ones are), and it'll be on YouTube sometime this summer even if not

ok great thanks

i need to read the books more to see if i can find some more typos and earn some more bounties. the main problem with that is that typos are pretty rare in your books

gdata what an fun adventure - get something working and a week later Google changes something and app breaks .... yawn

I|O is May 8th ish?

10th and 11th

i agree fitz, the android platform is a moving target and there's a lot of diffs amongst the hardware. while that makes development harder it does and will continue to drive handset sales, which should mean more app installs

ya agreed it is gdata that is so much fun :) can't complain to much at least they are making changes weekly now and not yearly like they use to ....

if anyone comes up with a question, chime in

so to clarify - do search via dgata for email and calendar - once I find results I can search local contacts on cell - correct? They I can display results with RSS info and GPS data if needed

they = then

um, that sounds about right

ya like I said I need to take the day off from typing

been up since about 3am and that is not normal protocol :)

if it makes you feel better, I'm short on sleep too

so Penguins going to make a run of it this year?

beats me

oh ya your not into hockey right

first, I'm eastern PA -- more in Flyers territory

playoffs started yesterday - ops sorry Flyers

second, hockey is so far off my radar, that I don't pay attention hardly at all

as far as I'm concerned, hockey is the intersection of curling and MMA, neither of which I pay attention to, either :-)

lol. i often do all-nighters. i've been up (except for a 30 min snooze) since 2pm yesterday. after i follow-up some emails, it's lights-out for me

well I bet if you turn on the news or radio they are talking it up - so you get some exposure :) There was a live demo feed last night for javaFX - you see it? was interesting

oh, yeah, that's right, JavaFX isn't dead yet

tampa bay has a team, but i havent been following it

I can never keep score

they are not in beta yet but real soon

ok thanks Mark off to do more tutorials - good thing I am not typing much today :)

have fun!

howdy, Don!

Hello

hi

Don: do you have a question?

i've been playing around with some of the android OGL engines. the most interesting appear to be libgdx and andengine

Yes, I'm trying to figure out why onItemSelected() is not being called in the Collections/Grid example from the first book

Sure it is

Bear in mind that selection events are driven by the D-pad/trackball/whatever

tapping on a Grid item is a click event

I'm running in the simulator and clicking on the items

click != select

ok

So, I would have to register for clicks and then tell the Grid to select that item?

um, well, if you want to find out when something is clicked, you would set up an OnItemClickListener

you would not tell the GridView "to select that item", as that has no meaning when you're in touch mode (screen taps) and would be superfluous if the user clicked using the D-pad/trackball/whatever

ok

thanks

no problem

i guess time is about up and there's no need for me to fill the void. lol. i'll see you next time.

OK, see you later!

howdy, Kathy!

Hello

the chat is just about over -- do you have a quick question?

What is the best way to handle the different screen sizes in Android?

that is so not a quick question :-)

Is there a good tutorial I could look at?

see Chapter 25 in _The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development_

and see http://developer.android.com/guide/practic…

I thought I was getting in earlier. I wasn't able to get into the chat last week to ask this question.

I did look at Chapter 25 but I am still finding it very confusing.

then my recommendation would be to come up with somewhat more focused questions, either for future chats, or for StackOverflow

to put it in perspective, it would take a couple of hours of live training to really go through it all, if we're including fragments and dealing with phones-vs.-tablets

When is your next chat?

next week's are Tuesday at 7:30pm Eastern and Thursday at 10am Eastern

Is there a device or a couple of devices that a lot of developers are targeting so I could worry less about the screen issues?

not really

or, more to the point, it's not a question of device, but a question of screen size and density

developers are usually targeting everything, though perhaps not so much the really small screens (e.g., 3")

Are developers targeting particular screen sizes and densities?

and developers are slowly getting into tablets, as the tablets are slowly getting out there

normal screen size in medium and high density is the "sweet spot"

I have a simple background, would a good starting point be to try and make it the largest phone device size and let it get made smaller?

large/xlarge screen size are your tablets, which is growing in importance but still fairly few in number today

What is the normal screen size in medium and high density?

normal *is* a screen size -- screen sizes are small, normal, large, and xlarge

see Table 1 on http://developer.android.com/guide/practic…

When I am creating a png in photoshop what would be the best size to make it then?

that's impossible to answer in the abstract

personally, I have no experience with activity backgrounds, and would generally recommend developers avoid them, specifically for this sort of problem

games are one of the few areas where having a custom PNG background makes sense, and I'm not a game developer

If I was aiming for the sweet spot what would be a good size to make my background. The background will not be animated and will be more of an abstracted texture.

I'm afraid that I cannot answer that

again, personally, I have no experience with activity backgrounds

okay

white or black, from the built-in themes, are all I use

my guess is that you will wind up with a couple of images, to handle different aspect ratios, and perhaps more if the built-in scaling doesn't give you nice results, but that's a guess

I am trying to create a little bit of a richer experience and differntiate myself from some of the other apps with what I thought would be very simple graphics.

graphics are fine, but it tends to be easier to use them for individual elements, not full-screen backgrounds

anyway, I really must be going

That helps then. Are you saying I shuold really concentrate my graphics into buttons and the like?

again, next week's chats are Tuesday at 7:30pm Eastern and Thursday at 10am Eastern

yes, buttons and similar iconography tend to be easier

it's not to say that you *can't* do backgrounds, but that it's a common pain point, and may not be worth the hassle

sorry I am not of greater assistance on this specific topic

have a pleasant day!

That is good to know and probably why I have been having such difficulty finding out info.