howdy, fitz!

hello

how can I help you today>

er, today?

question once I have some code tested etc should I run it through something like proguard

it's fairly popular

and integrated into the toolchain

at least for Ant (not sure about Eclipse, though I'd presume it's integrated there too)

yes it does have some integration into Eclipse so the docs say

so looks like it is worth doing then

it's a must if you're using LVL

LVL?

License Verification Library

ok

not there yet ....:)

so you had time to come back to eath from IO

earth

that presumes that I am normally on Earth

some might dispute that concept

:-)

howdy, John M.!

Hi Mark

Big fan, first time visiting chat

John: how can I help you today?

Well... I don't know if I need specific help, I was (re) inspired by IO last week and resurructing some of my android plans (after a year of ios development)

I've seen the office hours for a while and was just sort of curious how they worked. Do people come with specific questions or ?

that's mostly the aim

you're welcome to just hang out, but that's not really the objective of the chat

some days, there will only be a couple of people, like now

some days, I'll be rotating through 6-8 people's questions

I get you -- Actually I have one question:

fire away!

I will probably get the termonolgy wrong so bear with me.

My last android project was shelved because I couldn't solve the problem of streaming video off of a server that required authentication.

AFAIK, that situation hasn't improved any

if anyone comes up with a question, just chime in

Hi

I was wondering if you could help me understand the relative layout a little better? I have been trying to configure a row layout that consists of an image on the far left, and four textviews to the right; two of the textviews (topline and bottomline) take up the remainder of the screen and the middleline is split between the remaining two textviews. However when I view this in the emulator all rows are squished at the bottom.

Sorry, I was pulled away. Ok, I was afraid of that.... Maybe one more question? I planning on 'solving' it by starting a background buffer and then having the media player work off that file -- I never got it to work reliably, do you know of any examples of that working off hand? (feel free to answer Darryl first btw)

howdy, Darryl!

Darryl: you probably cannot solve that with just a RelativeLayout

ok

particularly "the middleline is split between the remaining two textviews" part

I also tried embedding a table but it did not seem to change

I am new two Android as well so I apologize if these are basic questions

that sort of thing is probably a better question for StackOverflow, if you post a diagram showing your desired layout and the XML that you are trying to use

ok I can post on StackOverflow

John: there may be people who have solved the problem that way, but I am not familiar with any particular implementations

ok, thanks....

Darryl: if you happen to have a diagram handy, we can try to work through it here in the chat, but I'm guessing that you would need to draw one

yeah it wold take me a few to draw it out on the screen

the books are great by the way

thank!

er, thanks!

Hey Mark, has google released the new interface builder they showed at IO? The demo was pretty slick and it seems like it would help with a lot of layout questions/problems like Darryl mentioned?

I didn't get into that presentation -- too crowded -- and I haven't watched the video

My impression is that some of that already exists, and the rest is in the open source repo, to be released in the future

by the end of the year, I'll add coverage of this stuff to The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development

though, since I'm not an Eclipse user, the coverage may be rocky in spots :-(

Yea, now that I think about it he mentioned they were still testing it -- the demo was pretty impressive and would solve a lot of these 'how do I do this kind of layout' questions

what do you use if not eclipse? Command line?

yes, the hope is that Eclipse will have top-notch GUI design capability over time

yes, command line

if anyone has any questions, chime in!

ok I have a picture I am uploading now and the new GUI designer looked good from the video that I saw

ah, yeah, that's not quite what I had envisioned

I had my axes reversed

ah

anyway, that's a RelativeLayout holding your left, top, and bottom widgets, plus a LinearLayout for the middle pair

you'd use android:layout_weight to arrange for the 50-50 split of space in the LinearLayout

it is based on an example in the book, ah I did not try a linearLayout for the middle

I have to run Mark, have a nice evening.....

I was thinking I would have to use weight, but did not know if I could embed the other layout

thanks

I will work with that

ok cya

have a good night and thank you for the help, BTW I am not a fan of GUI designers either, just need to get moving on how the XML layouts work. :)

you're very welcome!