In this episode we pick off right where we left last time. So far we developed small applications that had one single activity. In the last tutorial we had a look at how to call other activities that are provided by other Android applications. If you want to know how to create your very own activity and how to incorporate it into your application, well, read on.

Continue reading / Write comment

If you are on a Windows machine and you are updating your installation of the Android SDK through the AVD Manager in Eclipse, you may have come across an annoying error, that says the installation failed because a folder failed to be renamed or moved. This happens probably because Eclipse sort of locks the folder of your Android installation and thus no other application (in this case the AVD Manager) gains access to it. Here is a quick and easy solution for the problem.

Continue reading / Write comment

The question came up if there is a simple way to sort lists and since the next video tutorial is dealing with Intents and not so much with lists, I thought I could just slip in this little quick tip that explains the basic method of sorting lists. There are actually two ways to achive a sorted list: you can sort the underlying data source or you can sort the elements in the actual list adapter. Lets see how that is done.

Continue reading / Write comment

If you want to use the exciting new features that come with Android SDK 2.0 a.k.a. ‘Eclair’, you will have to update your development environment. Now if you are still on Android 1.5 you can simply follow this guide. Although that guide teaches you how to update to SDK version 1.6, the involved steps are actually the same for the new version. Now, if you are already running on Android SDK 1.6, you can use the new update method via the Android SDK and AVD Manager Tool. Sounds complicated? Well, don’t worry, it is actually really simple. Let me show you how to do it.

Continue reading / Write comment

It is usually not very satisfying to have an application that consists of just one lonely activity. To start another activity you can use so-called Intents. In this tutorial I want to give you a brief overview of what Intents are and how to use them. We will start out very simple here and will work our way up in future tutorials. The purpose of this introduction is to show you some very basic sample uses of Intents.

Continue reading / Write comment

If you are new to Android development and you want to install all necessary software to get started, you can of course follow episode #1 in our tutorial series. Watching that video should get you up and running in no time. But what if you already have an Android development environment with an old SDK version? How do you actually update your installation to the latest version? Well, look no further, we have the answers you need.

Continue reading / Write comment

In this tutorial we will take a look at how to use ItemClickListeners within ListViews. For this episode we will extend the application we created in episode #7. When the user short-clicks on a list item, a small Toast mesage displays, indicating the list item that has been clicked on. A long-click on a list item can be used to remove that item from the list.

Continue reading / Write comment

In this episode we will take a look at the Alert Dialog. This dialog lets the user interact with your application and the great thing is, that it is also very easy to implement. You can use this dialog in many situations. Asking the user to confirm an action before executing it, is actually a good habit that will make your application look and feel more professional.

Continue reading / Write comment

In this episode we will take a first glance at lists and how to create them. This is the first episode on lists and due to the fact that lists are a very important and versatile content element, we will cover additional list related techniques in later episodes. So stay tuned!

Continue reading / Write comment