Grokking Android

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty of Android Development

FirefoxOS – my Initial Impression

By

Quite a while ago I ordered a Peak+ FirefoxOS phone at geeksphone.com. Alas after some delay it finally was cancelled – so I settled for the smaller version, the normal Peak. About a week or two ago it finally was delivered. After some very short initial testing I had more pressing things to do. But […]  Continue Reading  “FirefoxOS – my Initial Impression”

Migrating from ActionBarSherlock to ActionBarCompat

By

In July 2013 Google announced ActionBarCompat as part of its support library package. This library makes it easy to use the Action Bar that have to support older devices. Many have waited for this to happen ever since the Action Bar was introduced with Honeycomb. I, though, didn’t expect that to happen. After all the […]  Continue Reading  “Migrating from ActionBarSherlock to ActionBarCompat”

ActionViews Sample App is on Bitbucket

By

The sample app for my post about ActionViews is on Bitbucket. Besides Actionviews it serves also as the sample app for how to add ActionBarSherlock to projects, and for adding action items from within fragments. Here’s a screenshot of the demo: I plan on generating the scaffold for my demo apps so that I only […]  Continue Reading  “ActionViews Sample App is on Bitbucket”

SQLite in Android

By

SQLite is at the heart of Android’s database support. This database was developed with embedded environments in mind – and is used not only by Android but also by Apple’s iOS and Blackberry’s system as well as lots of other systems with low memory footprint and comparatively little CPU horsepower. Why SQLite in the first […]  Continue Reading  “SQLite in Android”

Two Days at the moosecon Conference

By

This year the German IT trade show CeBIT tried something new: A conference for mobile developers, called moosecon (mobile operating system conference). The conference lasted three days, of which I was present at two, Wednesday and Thursday. Here’s a short recap of the talks, I visited. Wednesday – March 6, 2013 / day one Thanks […]  Continue Reading  “Two Days at the moosecon Conference”

Adding ActionViews to Your ActionBar

By

As you have seen in the previous tutorials about ActionBarSherlock and the ActionBar, you can add action items easily and they show up either in the ActionBar itself or in the overflow menu. But so far all you could add were normal action items. And those consisted either of icons, of text or of a […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionViews to Your ActionBar”

Adding ActionBar Items From Within Your Fragments

By

This tutorial shows you how to add action items to the ActionBar from within your Fragments and how to disable or enable action items depending on the state of your fragment. All code works with the stock Android ActionBar object as well as with ActionBarSherlock. Why do you want to add action items? In a […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionBar Items From Within Your Fragments”

ActionBarSherlock: Up Navigation

By

In this tutorial I am going to cover some initial thoughts on navigation. The ActionBar allows multiple navigation modes. In this post I state which navigation modes exist, how to get to the ActionBar object in the first place and how to deal with the so-called up navigation. Less code than in the previous parts […]  Continue Reading  “ActionBarSherlock: Up Navigation”