Tutorials
23rd June 2010. 16:28
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Introduction
This is the third and final article in the series of how to make your own list view. Right now we have a basic working list with some nice graphics. Click here to go to the previus part of this tutorial. In this article we will add some behavior to our list and add the fling and bounce/snap effects. Fling support is in my view mandatory for any list where you navigate by touch. As a user I wouldn’t expect that the list simply stops when I lift my finger from the touch screen. If I give the list a velocity, I expect it to continue scrolling for a while, and gradually slow down until it comes to a halt. Fortunately, supporting fling is no big deal. In fact it’s very simple. Below is the source code for this part of the tutorial ready to be set up in e.g. Eclipse. And as usual: Don’t forget to download the ‘Sony Ericsson Tutorials’ app from Android market where all sample apps for this and other tutorials are collected.
As many of you probably saw yesterday Sony Ericsson announced a new product in the Xperia™ product line called X8. X8 brings together features from both X10 and X10 mini and will retail for under €200 in most markets. The X8 comes with a HVGA screen and a 3.2 mega pixel camera. Below is a short video showing what the X8 looks like.
More info on X8 and the Q3 update to Android 2.1 for X10 and X10 mini/pro can be found on our sister blog, the Sony Ericsson Product Blog
Last Thursday I attended the first Nordic Mobile Developers Summit in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish magazine mobile.se. I gave a presentation with the highly innovative title “Android for Developers” where I gave some tips and insights into successful Android application development. It was a very well received session that I will mostly likely repeat in updated forms at later events. All the slides from the event can be found online.
The sessions covered the major mobile platforms with representatives from both the device manufacturers and independent mobile application development companies. The common message from the device manufacturers was around the marketplaces for their platforms. While some platforms provide a very low entry barrier for application developers (i.e., Android Market) most of the marketplaces had a surprisingly high threshold for publishing applications.
Despite the name of the event, there was surprisingly little hard facts around actual application development. Most of the sessions concerned the business perspective of mobile applications. As for my own session, I tried to give some concrete tips’n'tricks for Android application development, what is most important to think about and what tools to use.
One of the more interesting presentation came from Johan Lindfors from Microsoft that demonstrated the development tools for Windows Phone 7. It is obvious that Microsoft knows how to make tools for developers. This is something that I believe could inspire for better tools in the Android community as well.
The second half of the event started with shorter presentations from various companies doing mobile application development, like Spotify and Bambuser. There were some quite interesting case studies, and it seems like Android is the easiest platform to develop for, from all aspects.
The event was summed up with a Q&A panel with many interesting (and challenging) questions. The interest for mobile application development is very high and it is obvious that developers want to have a much larer choice of tools and programming languages for their applications than what is available today.
Welcome to the third part of the Android tutorial on how to make your own zoom control like the one used in Sony Ericsson X10 Mini in the Camera and Album applications. Click here to read the second part of the tutorial.
Don’t forget to go to Android Market and download Sony Ericsson Tutorials, the app that collects all sample apps in this and other Sony Ericsson tutorials. Get the QR-code for the app here. Below is a link to the source code of part 3, prepared for you to set up your own project in e.g. Eclipse.
[Download] One Finger Zoom sample project – Part 3 (215kb)
This tutorial part will focus on introducing a new way of interacting with the zoom, a new input paradigm as our designers would say. In the previous tutorial we laid the ground for exactly this when we created a new class for controlling the zoom state. Separating the state control from the input control handled by an OnTouchListener implementation.
Tomorrow, the 10th of June, Erik Hellman from Sony Ericsson will be speaking at the Nordic Mobile Developers Summit in Stockholm where he will be talking about how to make a successful Android application. At Sony Ericsson Erik works as an architect for Android software and has been involved in the X10 mini project from the start. Erik has long experience from Sony Ericsson and is a well known speaker at conferences all over the world.
Erik will be blogging from the event so keep your eyes open for blog posts from Erik in the next few days.
Last week we attended the SWDC 2010 event in Stockholm which ran over two-days from Wednesday 2nd to Thursday 3rd of June. The days were back-to-back with interesting sessions but we were mainly there for the second day which was focused on mobile.
Claes Nilsson and myself decided to talk about some of the work we are doing with standards and also the various tools and ideas we have available now and coming soon. We wanted developers to come and join us within W3C and get involved in some of the on-going standards work.
We are working on ways to expose phone features to the web runtime where we have 4 platforms and the common thread is the web browser – the cost is that you need to target lowest common denominator to work across platforms so we are trying to increase the default capabilities available and make them consistent.
The development of standards usually takes a long time – the trade-off in having well thought out and, as much as can be, long-term future relevance. We presented some middle-grounds, such as the WebSDK but also some prototypes of entirely web-based tools.
The main focus of our session was our ”WARP” (Web Application Runtime Platform) demo upon the X10. In essence it is a server that allows the web browser, through user-granted approval, to access and query the phone. Our intention is take ”real world” lessons-learned from implementation and testing and roll them back into the specifications work.
We had a small setup outside the main presentation area with some X10, X10 mini and X10 mini pros. The feedback was great and we really appreciated the time we got with people as they tested out apps – in some cases even some live coding to optimise layouts.
We would like to thank @petersvensson for putting on the event and his team of volunteers who did a great job.
Photo stream @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonyericssondev/
![Showing HTML5 device orientation on Xperia with Ice Cream Sandwich [demo]](http://img.youtube.com/vi/Q4CTkjaYumM/default.jpg)
