Author: Luca Zanini

  • gimp-android-xdpi

    I found this very useful plugin for gimp, called gimp-android-xdpi, that allows you to easily create images with the desired dimensions in the directories drawable-ldpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-hdpi and drawable-xhdpi of an Android project, following the guidelines explained on Icon Design Guidelines and links therein.

  • The differences between the code for the emulator and the code for a real device

    The Android developers can use Sensor Simulator to test their applications, in particular when they use sensors such as accelerometer or compass. In this post I explain the differences in the code for an activity that runs on the emulator or a real device, and I don’t discuss how to install or launch the emulator,…

  • Customizing the labels of an ActionBar

    In the post Tab Layout in Android with ActionBar and Fragment I wrote an example of using an ActionBar whose labels are shown in uppercase even if you use the statement: actionBar.newTab (). setText (“my string”); where “my string” is lowercase. In this article I show how to customize the labels in lowercase but it…

  • Preventing the rotation of the screen in Android

    To prevent rotation of the screen in Android you can use one of two statements:Android: screenOrientation = “portrait”orAndroid: screenOrientation = “landscape”being included in the activity tag in the file AndroidManifest.xml.

  • Keeping the Android screen on

    Sometimes you prefer to keep the Android screen on also in case of prolonged inactivity, this limit is usually set at 30 seconds, beyond which the screen turns off to increase the battery life. This can be true for applications like watching movies, navigators, or even during the development phase of an application. To keep…

  • How to access to the members of outer class from inner class

    You can’t access to the members of an outer class from an inner class using the keyword “this”. In fact, the keyword “this” in an inner class is a reference to the inner class itself. To have a reference to the outer class, you must use the syntax: [OuterClassName].this where [OuterClassName] is the name of…

  • The android.os.NetworkOnMainThreadException exception

    In this article I explain a possible cause of android.os.NetworkOnMainThreadException and how to avoid it. From the Android site you can read: NetworkOnMainThreadException The exception that is thrown when an application attempts to perform a networking operation on its main thread. This is only thrown for applications targeting the Honeycomb SDK or higher…

  • How to add a file .jar to an Android project in Eclipse

    Adding a file .jar from the menu of Eclipse, File -> Properties -> Java Build Path -> Libraries -> Add External JARs…, causes an error, the project compiles but at runtime you get the error “NoClassDefFoundError” as if the file .jar was missing in the project.

  • Tab Layout in Android with ActionBar and Fragment

    In a previous post I wrote an example of Layout Tab using a TabActivity class that it is deprecated since version 3.0 Honeycomb of Android.In this post I develop the same interface using ActionBar and Fragment, and I tried wherever possible to limit the changes to the files *.xml.

  • Tab Layout in Android

    This post is an example of implementing a tab layout in Android using a TabActivity class.The TabActivity class is deprecated since version 3.0 Honeycomb, then you should use ActionBar as I’ll write in a next post.