Hi Mark, how are you today?

howdy, Chaitanya and Tej!

Hey Mark !

Chaitanya: you arrived first -- do you have a question?

I have a couple of questions

My first is about Log usage: http://developer.android.com/reference/and…

When we publish the app, do all log statements get muted? My concern is about performance and security.

No, all log statements do not get muted

quoting those docs: "Debug logs are compiled in but stripped at runtime. Error, warning and info logs are always kept. "

I presume that verbose logs are treated the same as debug

however, any work you do to actually do the logging still occurs

again, quoting those docs: "That means that if your log message is filtered out, you might be doing significant work and incurring significant overhead. "

since debug logs are still compiled, does it impact performace?

the work you do to construct the logged strings, yes

now, if the strings are just static inline "quoted stuff", there should be negligible overhead

and, unless you're doing these in a tight loop, they're not going to cause much impact

so it is a good practice to strip our application of debug logs before publishing?

um

you can't say that as a blanket statement

if you use a debug logging statement once per year, the extra nanoseconds won't matter

if you use a debug logging statement once per millisecond in a loop, the extra time will matter

now, if you want to take the time to get rid of all of them, more power to you

but I'd be *much* more worried about the error/warning/info (and wtf) logs

and making sure you're not leaking private data in them

understood. thank you

i'll let advantej ask his question before I move on to my next one

sounds great

Tej: do you have a question?

Thanks Chaitanya, Hi Mark, my question might sound a bit complex - may be not to you :)

I have extended a DialogPreference. In its onCreateView, I'm returning a custom view which has couple of buttons. On button click, a Facebook signin happens. All is well till here - works fine. On successful login, I get a call back. I need to update the text of this button. Not sure how to go about it.

(btw, howdy, Steve -- we'll get to you shortly!)

(no worries - thanks!)

hmmm...

I think you need to hold onto the created view yourself

i tried Activity.runOnUiThread, didn't work

I don't think you can get that back

what do you mean by hold onto ?

well, let's back up a step or two

user taps your preference

sure

dialog appears

user clicks button

yup

you are then... popping up another activity with a WebView?

kind of

i'm using the FB library

I've never used their library

in part because I don't use FB

it does all this stuff and finally givs me a callback

into a listener - onComplete method

ah

OK

is the dialog still on the screen at this point?

yes it is

OK, make the listener be an inner class of the DialogPreference

have the DialogPreference hold onto the View it returns in onCreateView

and the listener in onComplete() updates the TextView

yup

i can try that..

and I take it that's not working?

currently i have the listener as a local variable in the onCreateView

that could conceivably work, with the right final keywords

you mentioned runOnUiThread() -- are you being called on a background thread?

i'm not sure of that, I just gave it a try since just updating the textview didnt' work

when you say "didn't work", did it crash, or just have no visible effect?

no visible effect,

that's a little odd

if i go somewhere and comeback, i see the text changed

this simple text update is killing me for 2 days now

"go somewhere" meaning close the dialog and reopen it?

actually its not a pop up dialog, i have used your Pref/Fragments example

well, DialogPreference uses a dialog

that's kinda why they named it that way :)

so the "Dialog" appears on the right side Fragment

why am I thinking that DialogPreferences still pop up dialogs?

yes, DialogPreferences pop up dialogs

in my sample, the RingtonePreference, EditTextPreference, and ListPreference are all subclasses of DialogPreference

ok. in the Pref/Fragments, the preference_headers points to a fragment... and this fragments creates a CustomPreference(extends DialogPref) and adds the view.

and that View appears in a dialog

it appears not as a pop up but in the right fragment

um, not in any of my testing

even a custom DialogPreference, like the TimePreference from the tutorials, brings up a dialog when you tap on it

oh, wait

onCreateView()

yes

!

I was thinking onCreateDialogView()

I still don't know why that would not update

there are samples around (albeit not in my books) of updating the text inside a Preference dynamically

Hmm.. let me try the innerclass thingy and hope for the best

and will try to find other examples as well

that second one suggests perhaps calling getListView().invalidateViews() in your PreferenceActivity (or, in your case, PreferenceFragment, I guess)

anyway, give that stuff a shot and hopefully it'll help

Steve: do you have a question?

sure.. thanks !

Yes sir. My question is about MapViews. I can annotate them, place overlays on current location, etc. I'm curious - what's the proper way to enable a "tap & hold" type of gesture? I tried setLongClickable and passing in a listener, but it never seems to fire.

(Ideally I'd like to translate the tap & hold point to obtain the lat/long and then perform reverse geocode on it)

if I had to guess, you will have to handle that yourself using onTouchEvent()

others have asked that, and it appears that MapView does not support setOnLongClickListener()

for whatever reason

the Advanced Android book has a sample of doing drag-and-drop of OverlayItems that uses touch events

Pardon my ignorance, but by onTouchEvent, do you mean something like a GestureDetector?

no, though conceivably that could work too

haven't tried GestureDetector for long-clicks

onTouchEvent() is a method you override

that's the project associated with the drag-and-drop example in the Advanced Android book

the ItemizedOverlay implements onTouchEvent()

you get a MotionEvent as a parameter

it will tell you things like ACTION_DOWN, meaning the user placed a finger on the screen

and so on

my example, and the accompanying prose in the book, explains how to use that to detect a tap on an OverlayItem and arrange to drag-and-drop that OverlayItem

in your case, you would detect a down event, and if there is no corresponding up event within X milliseconds, it's a long-click

and you do something

Yes - I recall NooYawkTouch. I'll give that another look. Thank you!

sure!

Chaitanya: you said you had another question?

Yes

I apologize if this is a basic question, but I'm still learning how to effectively code in Java and use the Android SDK

Its about creating menus: all of the activities in my app have menu items. some are common, some are not. what is the most efficient way to code this?

such that I dont recreate ALL menu items in EACH activity

um, well, to a large extent, you don't have a ton of choices

but rather each activity can specify which items it needs

you're welcome to cook up some sort of MenuDelegate, to which your activities pass your onCreateOptionsMenu(), onOptionsItemSelected(), etc. events

along with flags indicating what they want

and have the MenuDelegate handle that work

or, use inheritance

depending on the nature of your app, when you move into fragments, the fragments can also contribute to the options menu

in which case, it may be that simply having the right fragments on-screen magically gives you the right menu choices

(Howdy)

but outside of that, there's nothing particularly unique to Android here -- just choose a pattern (e.g., composition and delegation) that you like

(btw, howdy, zettie and Julius -- be with you momentarily!)

sorry but I didn't understand any of the suggested solutions

by delegation

to be honest, your simplest solution is: just duplicate the code for now

do you mean extension? Like activity extends menuActivity ?

that would be inheritance

ok

you could create some sort of ChaitanyaBaseActivity that has your common menu logic

and have other activities inherit from it

since Java does not support multiple inheritance, you can run into problems here

wouldn't that imply all menu items will be inherited?

you would have to have smarts in ChaitanyaBaseActivity to determine what is needed for each specific subclass

how can the baseActivity know which activity its being used in?

it would call an abstract method that the subclasses would override

or, ChaitanyaBaseActivity would only handle the common ones, and subclasses would override the same methods (e.g., onCreateOptionsMenu()) and add in the activity-specific ones

again, none of this is unique to Android

this is all Java and object-oriented programming

ok, it looks like I need to spend some more time understanding some of the concepts you've brought up

let me get to some of the other folks' questions, and I can perhaps swing back to you for more in a bit

zettie: do you have a question?

thank you

How do I ensure data security in an android app? Is it enough if I post to a https link that I've been told is secure?

um, I could easily do a day-long seminar on "how do I ensure data security in an android app"

and really it would need to be a week-long class, but I probably don't know enough to fill that time :)

HTTPS on Android is not significantly different that HTTPS anywhere else

done right, it solves the problem of people intercepting the data between you and the server

is the "done right" on the web server side or the app side?

ideally, the Web server uses an SSL certificate from a well-known certificate authority, that Android will recognize

if, for some reason, the Web server will use some other SSL certificate (e.g., a self-signed one), that may require additional work on the app side to ensure that it is a valid certificate

Julius: do you have a question?

yes:)

sorry bout that not sure why my paste went like this

hmmm I just realised that I haven't looked this up in your latest book (apologies if it's in there, feel free to just tell me and I'll go look it up)

not sure

I was hoping for some kind of flag or something

it seems like it's used quite abit

there's probably a style or theme setting that controls that

ok. thanks.

ah that rabbit hole :)

thanks all the same

sorry!

Steve: do you have another question?

appreciate your itme

time

OK, does anybody have another question?

well...

:)

do you know if there is a place to go to see how the styles are implemented

sort of like a reverse lookup

that depends on what you mean by "the styles"

for the SDK, they're in your SDK itself

$SDK/platforms/$API/data/res/values

so if I see something I want to change flip through some images to find the piece which I'm wanting to override

if you mean for an AOSP app, they'd be in the repository

yeah that's like a "forward" lookup

hey, I foolishly did not check your books for anything on android data security - is there anything written on it?

but for closed-source apps like Gmail, not really

I guess the problem is I don't always know what the style is referring to

zettie: there is no single spot for security

zettie: it is covered in various places related to the tech (e.g., files)

lol. ok thanks

zettie: nothing on HTTPS, since it's pretty much standard Java

I will do some searching. thank you!

Julius: yeah, I know what you mean

I find I am overriding some piece of style and I end up guessing a bit

could be my lack of skills with Themes and styles

if you only have to guess "a bit", you're better at it than I am

hahahah

(always a pleasure)

I feel that I usually am just swinging a sledgehammer and seeing what breaks when I fuss with styles

yeah... ok so it's not just me

I might try bring it up a hangout

at at ^

at a

any other questions from anyone?

you likely to try to get to IO again?

oh, probably

cool well if we both manage to get tickets I'll try catch up again

it'll be a lottery this time so, not sure if I'll make it

did they officially state it'll be a lottery?

(I hope so though - we converted out Android dev group into a GTUg earlier in the year)

but I don't think that will help us

GTUGs should get help if you wanted to host the streaming events

umm my understanding is that there will be some programming questions to weed out non developers as they want to aim it at developers

but I don't know about actual tickets

oh, well, now, that should be interesting

I think after that you go into a lottery of sorts

but I'm not sure

don't hold me to it!

I think they wiull also have some tickets available for a coding competition too

well, anything's an improvement over let's-all-sign-up-at-once-and-crash-the-server

yeah, they did that last year too

so to actually complete the registration you have to complete programming questions

for a lot of people, the streaming will suffice

ah I didn't know

yeah that's true

the time difference isn't too big here

they gave away 100 tickets or so through some coding challenges, months after the server collapse

if I suddenly feel super wealthy (unlikely) I'd contemplate setting up a local streaming setup

anyway, that's a wrap for today's chat

yeah

oops 111 I better let you go

yeah

thank you again

next one is tomorrow at 7:30pm US Eastern

have a good day / evening

have a pleasant day, all!

cool

bfn