Every app needs an icon, a logo, something that people can recognize it by. Many apps have really nice ones and many don’t. Most importantly the icon should be unique.

My first idea was to do something cheap like create a button in gimp and write something on it. I quickly trashed that one. Cheap looks cheap and that is that.

My second idea was to hope that a google search would turn up something, however thoughts on copyright and licensing got rid of that one even faster. So I picked up something with a creative commons license to have something to work with while I was thinking of a solution.

Next I thought to just try and find stock vector graphics at one of the great stock sites on the net. I also needed icons the tabs and the menus. The stock sites didn’t work either because (1) they are expensive and (2) I just did not find anything that clicked.

I came to the conclusion that there was no way around making the icon myself. Quite a scary prospect when you have never done any graphic design whatsoever. Still I installed some vector graphics tools. After trying several I stayed with inkscape. There are a lot of really great tutorials for inkscape. Trying to learn how to use inkscape, I completed just one of those (two, to tell the truth, I already linked to the other in my previous article!). I read a bit more of the documentation and just started with the ideas I had for the icon.

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I’ve only been writing code for android for a short time and already my ui requirements got to such proportions, that my layout xml files seemed to explode. I hate copy-pasting the same stuff all over the place and so I spent a day to find out how to “not copy paste” my xml layouts. Instead I wanted a re-usable parametrized tag of my own. What good is xml, if we cannot have our own tags?

The Problem

Imagine you have half a dozen input values for a bunch of measures taken. For each input value you want a label, an input field and a second label showing the unit that is to be used.

[sourcecode language=”xml” wraplines=”true”]
<TextView android:id="@+id/label"
style="@style/LabelFont"
android:text="@string/label_fnord" />
<EditText android:id="@+id/fnord" style="@style/InputBox" />
<TextView android:id="@+id/label_length1"
style="@style/UnitFont"
android:text="@string/metric_length" />
[/sourcecode]

So you got this nice xml which is already using styles to reduce some of the verbosity – six times. It is neither short, nor easy to read and so it is easy to overlook some tiny detail like mismatched labels and ids. It also leads to convoluted java code and more copy-pasting. This is not the solution you are looking for.

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Since I am just getting started with Android, I keep running into beginner’s troubles and misunderstandings. There is the really good documentation. But even so, some mistakes happen along the way.

One of these problems occurred when after finishing the Notepad tutorial I wanted to use my newly acquired knowledge to incorporate a ListView into my first project. Continue reading →

A nice little hack, I found the other day, shows how to log into the running android emulator and test a few selects on the database my app created.

Where you installed your android sdk there is a directory called platform-tools/ which contains a neat little thing called adb, which is short for Android Debug Bridge. With this tool you can open a shell into the emulator and look around some.

adb -e shell

Once inside just follow the instructions of the link above to find out if your database is what you thought it should be. (Update: just take the short path to /data/data/your.package.name/databases and then sqlite3 yourdatabasename)

PS: yes I am trying to learn how to program android apps 😉