Hi Mark

hello, Susheel

how can I help you today?

So I have a custom built Single Board Computer with Android installed on it. It does not have an accelerometer. I am trying to manually rotate the display by 180 degrees when inverted. I am only interested in landscape mode. How can I do that?

I have no idea, as that would have to be at the firmware level AFAIK

I used rotation attribute on the layout but it only rotates the layout and the Toast messages, popup menus etc appear upside down.

after all, you have no way of rotating the status bar or navigation bar yourself at the SDK level

right

that's why the only full solution that I would know of would have to be in the OS itself, and the details of that are well outside my area of expertise

I do have a customly installed accelerometer and it notifies me when the device is inverted. I was thinking I might be able to just rotate the display but I guess now I have to manually write some tweaked code instead :)

sorry I didn't have a better solution for you

No problem, thank you

hello, D Shen!

Hello!

D Shen: Susheel has already asked a question, so it is your turn -- do you have a question?

Did I interrupt an ongoing question? Or may I ask mine

ah nice

Hi

So are you familiar with the iOS pattern where the notifications are shown as a red bubble next to the icon app on the home screen?

hello, James!

(James: your turn will be next!)

Sure, no worries

D Shen: I assume you're referring to what in Android has been called a badge

right, yep

I'd the launcher icon to show a badge by default

I'm able to make a widget which shows the badge

but I'd like to be able to have that widget with the badge, be the default home screen icon

does that make sense?

yes, though it's not supported

ah shoot

there is nothing that requires a home screen to offer badge support

I wasn't able to find much online about it

some device manufacturers have home screens that support badges

and there's no standards around them

right. So perhaps then can you shed some light on why Android phones in other parts of the world do have badges>

ah ok haha

and plenty of home screens will not support the badges, including any written by Google

ah i see

Hmm. Is there anything I can do as a developer if I were able to get my hands on another phone that does support badges?

the Stack Overflow question I just pasted a link to contains some discussion of manufacturer-specific badge support

I ran across it recently when helping somebody out on a related issue

oh awesome, yea looks helpful

and I think I read that there's a library that tries to wrap up all that manufacturer-specific stuff into a common API

just bear in mind that only some users will get the benefit, so be judicious in how you market this feature

excellent

let me take a question from James, and I'll be back with you in a bit

yup, i'll keep that in mind

James: your turn! do you have a question?

that's awesome, thanks a lot makr

mark

Yep Mark

Its a simple one, but I seem to be having more trouble than I should be

Im having trouble importing projects the cw-omnibus-master projects into android studio

that's not surprising

I've been running into that with attendees of my training this week

Oh ok good to know im not alone

there are two things you need to address to get those to import at present:

1. you need Gradle 1.12 to be installed, from gradle.org

2. you need to have the appropriate Build Tools installed from the SDK Manager (mostly version 19.1.0)

I hope to improve this somewhat for next week's book update

ok

though that'll depend a bit on how large of a rabbit I can pull out of my hat

so currently the latest version of gradle seemns to be 2.1

correct

the problem is the Gradle for Android plugin

up until ~10 days ago, the latest Gradle for Android plugin was 0.12.2

and that only worked with Gradle 1.x

(of which 1.12 is the latest)

Ohh ok

Gradle for Android 0.13.2 is now out, and that requires Gradle 2.1

and so I'll be updating my samples to use Gradle for Android 0.13.2, which will change the Gradle requirement

Ohh ok yep

I am also hoping to work out the means by which to convince Android Studio to add a Gradle wrapper for the projects, avoiding the need for you to have to install Gradle separately

I'll also be updating my requested Build Tools to be whatever Android Studio presently ships (20.0.0?)

so when it asks me to locate Gradle Home, Im assuming I point to the location of the 1.12 installation

correct

or, set your GRADLE_HOME environment variable to point there, and Android Studio should find it automagically

Oh yep thats sounds good

is it the root directory of the installation or a subdirectory?

(that I should be pointing to)

the root

Ok cool

thanks Mark for the pointers

let me take a question from D Shen, and I'll be back with you in a bit

D Shen: your turn! do you have another question?

Im all good Mark, thanks for your help, and thanks for the awesome book!

you are very welcome, and thanks for the kind words!

D Shen: do you have a question?

oops sorry, no questions

I was afk

thanks again!

bye bye