Hello

just picking up new books -

howdy, fitz!

remember: lift with your knees, not with your back

:-)

so summer finally hit bat area :)

"bat area"?

bay

ah

ya typing to fast :)

thought maybe it was a Giants reference

so - I hard that there are 4.5 billion cell phones vs 1 billion PC's - is that a true stat? you hear the same?

I've heard varying figures, but those sound roughly right

bear in mind that "cell phones" != "smartphones"

wow

more people in China, developing nations, etc. will have a cell phone than a PC

ya but that is amazing - so many people must just have cells and no PC's

I have not looked into this at all but is it a recompile to get a localized version? or a ton more to it?

define "localized version", and what, specifically, you're localizing

language specific version

of what?

does the phone handle language differences or do we code for it - IE English version, Chinese version etc.

OF WHAT? an app?

the OS itself?

something else?

Hello everyone.

app

howdy, Kathy!

fitz: you need to supply the strings

e.g., res/values/ for English, res/values-es/ for Spanish, res/values-de/ for German

Android then will use the right strings in the right cases

ok - just asking - when I get to that I will read up on it - thanks

Kathy: do you have a question?

Yes, I want to create a custom button that when pressed parts of it will change color. What would be the best way to go about this.

um, I don't even know if that's possible

the whole Button is either pressed or not

Well, when you press a radio button parts of the button changes color, not all of it.

oh, I see

actually, the whole image changes

it just so happens they chose images where some pixels are identical

so, what base widget are you looking at for this: Button? ImageButton? CheckBox? RadioButton? ToggleButton? something else?

howdy, Chris!

Yo

I'll have a question in a little bit.

OK

I think probably a radio button since only one can be chosen at a time. I am flexible on this.

OK, you need to replace the StateListDrawable that is used for the RadioButton button image

that is defined in btn_radio.xml in your SDK resources

it points to a series of PNG images based on density

you'd copy all those into your project and modify the PNGs to suit

then use setButtonDrawable() to associate it with the widget

to be more specific, "to associate your custom btn_radio.xml, as R.drawable.btn_radio, with the widget"

Thank you, that is very helpful. If I decided to do an imagebutton, what would be my approach?

well, if you're looking for "click the widget, and the image changes" behavior, I would not recommend an ImageButton

though, you could use it and just call setImageResource() to replace the image in the foreground of the button

actually, ImageButton isn't too bad for that, I guess

I want them to click the button, not necessarily in a list and go to another screen when the button is clicked.

then they'll never see the image change, no matter what the widget is

why are you worrying about changing the image?

let me take questions from the others, and I'll circle back to you

Chris: are you ready for your question?

I have an image that when pressed will change color. For example a flower shape and when the flower is pressed as part of the button, the flower would turn pink.

Not yet. I'm trying to eat some lunch and take care of something but I'll be ready in a few minutes. I just wanted to join because if I didn't I'd forget and it would be time to go home.

Kathy: but if as soon as they touch the button, they "go to another screen", they will never tell that the flower turns pink

ah, OK

fitz: do you have another question?

not for now thanks

Kathy: OK, we can continue if you have further questions

fitz & Chris: chime in if you want to ask a question

I'm composing my question because it's long :)

But the answer will probably be simple.

Kathy: If you make the ListView have android:choiceMode="singleChoice" and use a CheckedTextView for the rows (or make the rows support the Checkable interface), you get radio buttons on each row, on the right

kinda like you see in various list dialogs

or, if there will only be a couple of RadioButtons, put them in a RadioGroup and the RadioGroup in a ScrollView

Okay, thanks, I will try that. Thank you so much.

OK, you may not remember, but last time I asked about the max connections for the HttpClient and you said you usually don't see that being manually set so I took that out and everything works fine. So I'm just learning and kind of flailing around. Right now my app logs in to a the server and displays a list view of organizations that a user can access. They select and org and then it displays inventory objects like virtual machines, networks, etc. I'm not sure the best way to handle working with the listview. So when someone selects an item from the list it will query the server with the item's href. So the href needs to be assosiated with the item that was selected. At first I just had two arrays. One for the item and one for the href and then I would index them in the onClickListener, but that seemed dumb. So this time I created a class like VM with two functions: getName() and getHref(). Then I build a list of these objects and pass it into the listview. Then I use that setTag() to the view so later on in the onClickListener I can use getTag() and then like getHref(). Does that seem OK?

I was also thinking of storing the inventory items in a database and using that with cursor adapter

you don't need setTag()/getTag() for the ArrayAdapter/ArrayList scenario

when the user clicks an item, the position parameter is the index into your ArrayList

or, call getItem() on the ArrayAdapter

whether or not you should store the stuff in a database depends on whether or not you need to persist the info (e.g., offline access)

if you need to fetch it every time regardless, no sense in spending cycles on file I/O

Hmm I'll look into the getItem(). I'm going to bring up my project to see why I thought I needed setTag()

oh my goodness.

OK, I see :)

I was like man that doesn't seem right.

with ListView, getTag()/setTag() are mostly used for findViewById() lookup caching

if anything at all

Yeah I remember seeing that in one of your books and thinking that I bet I'm not using it correctly.

OK, you've answer that question. Someone else can go.

at this point, it's pretty much a free for all

if anyone has a question, chime in

This isn't really a question, but I messed up my sdk and downloaded a new version and when I run the emulator it's real big and ridiculously slow. It used to be about the size of my phone and fast.

you probably created an AVD for Android 3.0 or 3.1, which are designed for tablets

I use the snapshot feature and I guess it's OK once it gets up and running but I like the old one a lot better but no idea what type of config it had :(

for a phone-sized one, create an AVD for 2.2 or 2.3

the emulator speed is driven mostly by emulated screen size, which is why the tablets are so much slower

Well it's shaped like a phone but like 8" tall haha

I'll check though.

OK, I want to know how to make menus like in the Google music app.

Like you select an item and it expands to show you more items.

What should I look into for that?

question - if I have a gmail account set in phone - can my app access that user info to slice a dice info in my app - providing the user give my app permission? or do I need to create a settings function in my app

Chris: you mean like in the Artists tab, where entries fold out underneath the artist name for each album?

that's ExpandableListView

fitz: I do not know

Yep, okay thanks.

ok

I would have hoped that your question would have been covered in that "using Google GData APIs from Android" I|O presentation

which I haven't watched yet

cya have a great day

see ya!

Goodbye all, thanks for the help and patience.

have a pleasant day!

Mark, I don't have anything else right now.

Thanks a lot.

happy to help!

later

have a nice day, everyone!