Tag: android

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Android Java video

Android Camera2 Touch-to-Focus

Man Camera2 APIs are hard to master…
I’ve scanned SO for a way to get touch-to-focus to work on Android and could not find a solution that works.
These were very partial, or provided only scaffold code which I couldn’t use:

Finally I was able to do it by myself this way:

Enjoy
Roy

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Android Mobile phones Solutions

A Creative way to bypass Pattern lock on Android

Let me start putting everything on the table – this post will describe how I eventually managed to unlock an unrooted, non-Google account linked Samsung Galaxy Mini Plus (GT-5570I) device without ADB support. There are a lot of guides on how to bypass this pattern lock on Android (and I will provide some links), but the purpose of this post is to show how looking for creative ways to do this can come handy

So a friend gave me a locked device. This device had no Google account linked to it (which prevented me from bypassing the lock with that account), there was no root or ADB access via recovery, and the USB debugging option was disabled.

I found this guide here, which states some commands you can type in ADB shell and should deactivate the pattern lock. So – How do I get ADB access on that phone?

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Android Solutions

Android Market's apps compatibility problem [w/ solution]


WOW That was annoying! From the moment I started using a custom ROM on my Samsung Galaxy S2 (Cognition S2, to be exact), I started having issues with some apps.

Sometimes they won’t appear in search results, other times it will just say it’s not compatible. It drove me nuts!

Naturally I started with the forums – All the solutions there were about LCD DPI change. Funny, I never thought of that, but it did make sense. The only problem was that I never touched my DPI settings (Heck, I didn’t know I could).

(On a side note – tampering with the density is pretty cool… if you want to try it, you can download apps from the Market like LCD Density)

Back to my problem…

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Android code graphics gui Java Mobile phones programming tips

Android frame animation revisited [w/ code]

So, been working hard on my projects, and discovered some interesting things in Android possibilities for frame animation. Last time I was using an HTML approach, because of memory consumption issues with using ImageViews. However now my approach is using View.onDraw(Canvas) to draw BMPs straight off files, in an asynchronous way, and it seems to work pretty good.
Let me tell you how I did it

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Android Mobile phones

Number Saver gets a new look

Number Saver has been around for a while, but when I got around to it, it was always Number Saver App Iconabout the features. I felt the time is right to polish (even a bit) my Android UI skills and try and make it.

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graphics Java programming tips video

The woes of Frame Animation on Android [w/ code]

My adventures of getting frame animation on the Android 2.1 continue, and take a turn for the worse. Will I come up victorious in the end? Not sure…

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Android code graphics Java linux Mobile phones programming Solutions

Some things I learned about Android's Frame animation

Hi
Just a quick share of lessons learned about Android’s Frame-by-Frame animations. Some of the functionality is poorly documented, as many people point out, so the web is the only place for answers. Having looked for some answers to these questions and couldn’t find any – here’s what I found out myself.
Update [2/3/11]: A new post on this topic gives a more broad view of my experience.

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Android code Java Mobile phones programming tips

Reading contacts in Android 2.0+

On one of my Android apps, I added a trivial option to select a contact from the phone’s contact list. This was working fine until SDK version 5, which changed the way the contacts are represented in the phone’s SQLite database. It is using the “newer” class called ContactsContract instead of the deprecated People class

I have spent quite time in order to figure out which was the best way that will fit my needs. If you are in the same position, feel free to use the code below

My example below is will display a two row list of all the contacts, with alphabetical indexing. It is a mixture of code snippets I have found on the net, while may not be optimized; it will definitely give you the hang of things.

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Android Java Mobile phones programming Solutions

Number Saver (Android application)

A very basic feature that I was missing in my Android phone is the ability to save a number while I’m in a call. Sure you can go to the home screen, and open up any app with a textbox, but I decided to create a dedicated application.
So, meet Number Saver!
UPDATE: Number Saver got a new look
Basic usage guide:

When you open the app you will get the main screen:
From here you are able to enter the number, copy to the clipboard, and clear the clipboard if it is full. Also, when you open the app, if there is a text in the clipboard it will already be in the text box. So you can press Dial to instantly dial the number
Also, during an active call you will notice the note and pencil icon. Stretching the notification area will give you the option to launch the application.
This app is available for free through the Android market. Donation is always welcome …

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Android Java Mobile phones programming Solutions work

First steps in Android programming

Last week I finished my first Android application. All through the development stage I had to Google a lot for examples which some were really hard to find (even though you can find reference for everything in the SDK, for me, it’s easier to understand from a code sample).
My mobile company allows you to send 10 free daily SMS through their website, and after that each text message is still half priced, so I decided to take a challenge and create a UI that allows me to send my messages from the phone through the website automatically.
The core of my software was pure java, so even though it wasn’t straight forward to accomplish, I kinda know the material.
The main issues were after – when I got to the android implementation and UI
Here are the issues I needed, and will supply examples for in this post:
(Of course – for you that are more experienced than me with Android development, please forgive if I’m not doing everything ‘by the book’, it’s simply what I could find. So if you have any suggestions or improvement please send them to me or post a comment J )

  • How to find out if there is an active network on the device
  • How to create options menu
  • How to create and clear notification in the notification area
  • How to declare your program as “SMS Sender” (‘Complete action using…’)
  • Taking care of orientation (Landscape and Portrait mode for UI)

Here is the code I ended up using. Hope you find it helpful

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