Google announced a new set of tools this week to help developers publish their Chrome apps on iOS and Android. That’s the next logical step by Google to win over more developers for Chrome apps. In September Google already announced that from then on developers could publish their Chrome apps as offline apps, allowing users […]  Continue Reading  “Chrome-Apps on mobile devices – a good idea?”

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”

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 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”

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”

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”

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”

In my last post I had a look at how to set up a Fragment project that uses a master detail view. This week I am going to show you the necessary steps to make this project use the ActionBarSherlock library. ActionBarSherlock is a library by Jake Wharton, that enables you to use action bars […]  Continue Reading  “Adding ActionBarSherlock to Your Project”

Fragments are modular building blocks for creating a responsive Android UI. They help you to target different devices and screen sizes while at the same time avoiding code duplication. This post starts with the Android Developers Tools generating a project for you. I then explain some of the generated code and will show you how […]  Continue Reading  “Getting Started With Fragments and the Support Library”

Sometimes in our apps we have the need to link to data of other sources. You have a database of your own for your app, but some records also point to the MediaStore content provider to calendar entries or to contacts. For all detail pages this is not much of a problem. You get the […]  Continue Reading  “Android: How to Use Two Data Sources in ListViews?”