Hi Mark

Are you there?

howdy Frank!

sorry, missed the chime in the browser

how can I help you today?

First I wanted to say thanks for your help with the mobile class at FSU and you answered a question on stack overflow for my the other day :)

So I have 2 questions

you are welcome on both counts

My first issue is 9patch related. We have a sudo sliding drawer implementation. It's basically a view that when you click it expands only about 1/4 of the screen to display some more views

however, the background isn't really sized properly so it looks like the drawer is partially open

I think you mean "pseudo", unless your sliding drawer really executes commands as su

:-)

lol

There is only one piece that I would like to keep in scale while the rest needs to strech.

I guess after saying it out loud I need to just cut down the image size. But I suppose my problems lie in actually understanding the 9patch tool

I know the pixels on the top and left edge perserve the ratio of the intersection, but I never really understood what the pixels on the right and bottom do.

they define the "padding box"

basically, the "content" of the widget (e.g., text in a Button) must remain inside the "padding box"

pixels outside the "padding box" are built-in padding dictated by the 9-patch

this is why the question of "how do I make my Button smaller" results in a really annoying answer, involving redoing all the 9-patches for all the background states and rolling those into your own custom StateListDrawable

Hi all

howdy, James!

Frank: let me take a question from James, and I can swing back later for your 2nd question or follow-up on the first

ok. That helps clear that up. That explains why I always see lines and not dots on along those edges

ok

James: do you have a question?

Sure. Do you have any experience with the android backup service?

in a manner of speaking

ah! good

The docs state this: 'Data backup is not guaranteed to be available on all Android-powered devices'

actually, not good

and that's one of the reasons for "not good"

ha

ok

I *think* all devices with the Play Store and related infrastructure will have access to a backup service

that was what i was concerned about. what does it actually mean? Any examples (obviously, I've not read your article yet)

but that would leave out the Kindle Fire, NOOK series, etc.

yeah, that's what i assumed

but assumption...

and, as I point out in my blog, we don't actually know *where* the backup service might go to

I'm only interested in persisting a value across uninstalls, really

actually, I don't think it works for that scenario at all

AFAIK, it is for major calamities (e.g., user drops phone in bathtub)

where they get the app again after the factory reset/buy a new phone/whatever

ah

I will be rather surprised if you can use it for persisting data across an uninstall

i totally misread its usage

that being said, I haven't tried it that way, and so perhaps it works

since that would result in truly unbounded data storage requirements on the backup service, I would be nervous that even if it works now, they might drop it in the future

i guess i'll have to give it a go

good point

it does seem a rather unexplained, shall we say, feature

IMHO, I would only use it for "backing up" a URL to a *real* backup held elsewhere

so you could integrate it as part of a larger backup strategy

yet still take advantage of auto-restoration on a reinstall

I expect that I'll be working on this pattern in the next 6-9 months

this is the thing, i don't really have that option. i'm just limited to working within the device

let me swing back to Frank, and we can follow up more in a bit

sure

Frank: do you have another question?

It there a way to implement your own set of RadioGroup items?

I am not quite certain what you mean

For example, I want to use textviews as radio items and bold the text when they are selected

oh

I have a working implementation, but it just doesn't seem nice.

um, I suspect that the RadioGroup implementation will at least expect a CompoundButton, if not a full-fledged RadioButton

I'll be fairly stunned if RadioGroup can somehow work with arbitrary TextViews

it's not the most flexible implementation

I recall once considering writing a CompoundButtonGroup, to at least break the dependency on RadioButton

I ended up using real radio button and removing the icon and setting custom font, but the real problem is that I found myself "looping" over everything to see if it was checked or not in order to reset the font

for that, you are probably better served just having your own "group" construct, rather than fighting RadioButton and RadioGroup

but, regardless, I am not aware of anything built into Android that would handle your scenario

let's swing back to James for a bit

Ok. Well that at least makes me feel better about my implementation.

James: do you have another question?

not really. just specifically related to 'how do i know if this user has installed this app before', hence the backup service question

you are welcome to tuck something onto external storage and hope the user does not remove it

beyond that, there is no purely on-device solution

yeah, that's the only option i've got

ok then. thanks a lot for your time!

We've actually done this before and our solution was of course the cloud.

James: could you tie your device to a weather balloon and attempt to fly it into a cloud?

:-)

Frank: do you have another question?

yeah, i think some manufacturer's devices should come with their own balloons so that i don't see them again... ;-)

cheers all

No. Not at this time. Just tons of problems with image resizing because all my graphics were cut for iOS and none of them are 9patched

yeah, somebody should cook up a utility that takes a PNG and adds the one-pixel-wide frame to it

AFAIK, draw9patch assumes that frame is there

yep. I've had that problem several times already and much in the past as well

if you think of another question, chime in

ty

well, that's it for today's chat

next one is Tuesday, 7:30pm Eastern

have a pleasant day!

thanks mark. I'll be on more since I'm not teaching this summer

Laters