Given the browsers running on smartphones (and increasingly also those running on the desktop), all the “new” input types coming with HTML5 become increasingly important. For instance:
<input type=“time“ …
makes iPhone, Android et al present an optimized way of selecting a time / duration:
akquinet tech@spree has published a technology radar analyzing the trends of 2011–2012. It provides an overview of the evolution of practice in the Information Technology sector in 2011 as well as a forecast for 2012. It is the result of one year of analysis and synthesis performed by the Innovation department of akquinet tech@spree.
The technology radar captures the output from discussions, experiments, projects, and feedback from customers and developers. It synthesizes the results to inform global technology strategy decisions. It focuses on new technologies and methodologies with a high level of attraction. This document does not aim to provide an in-depth presentation of each technology, focusing instead on conciseness and highlighting the trends and state of the practice.
More information on http://radar.spree.de
The previous post of the Android Activities and Tasks series explained the concept of Android’s intents. We have seen how to use them to launch activities and how to utilize intent flags to customize the behavior of the launch to our needs.
In this post, we focus on activities themselves and explain the properties we can set on an activity or task to influence the activity launch behavior on the receiver side. In detail:
Android applications can grow very quickly. As they are composed of components (Activities, Services and Content Providers), it should be easy to extend an existing application to create new applications by just reusing already developed components. Recently, the akquinet Mobile Team had to develop several versions of the same application with a different set of features. This might sound easy, but Android does not really support such kind of modular development. Indeed, we faced several issues coming from the Android development model.
This blog post explains the encountered issues and how we fixed them by using rindirect. This tool allows, inside an Android application, to integrate components defined in other Android applications. This reuse pattern is close to impossible to achieve without rindirect or implies major limitations. Rindirect is developed by akquinet and is now available as open-source. This tools is well suited for Maven-based development, and so, works pretty well alongside the maven-android plugin.
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Despite of not being in widespread use in the Android world, Apache Maven is a great tool to develop Android applications. Maven has a lot of advantages relevant for Android application development:
This post explores how to quickly start developing Android applications using Maven. It presents three archetypes allowing getting a running application in less than 2 minutes!
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Developing sophisticated Android applications is challenging. Despite tools provided with the SDK and the recommended ADT Eclipse Plugin, maintaining and developing an Android application is time-consuming.
This blog post introduces a series on the rationalization of Android application development. It aims to explain how the akquinet mobile team have changed the way to create Android applications to improve the efficiency and quality of the developed applications. This series covers several topics, from the utilization of Apache Maven, the integration with a continuous integration server to the customization of the logging framework.
akquinet has participated in the improvement of all the tools used and presented in this series and has also released several internally developed components as open-source projects.
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The previous post of the Activities and Tasks series gave an introduction to the concepts behind activities and tasks. We have seen that activities correspond to visible screens in the UI, that activities are grouped as stacks within tasks, and tasks are sent to the background and foreground as atomic units. In this post of the series, we focus on Android’s intent concept and address the following questions:
Android application user interfaces are decomposed into ‘screens’ called activities. The user navigates from screen to screen thanks to buttons, clickable elements, keyboard keys, gestures, etc. Each activity manages one ‘screen’. Beyond those screens, ‘activity instances’ are created, configured, destroyed, recreated following a somewhat sophisticated lifecycle. To develop an activity, developers need to create a class extending the Activity base class and override a couple of methods to react to lifecycle transition, events etc. This blog post highlights the threading issues encountered when developing a responsive Activity.
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With Android, Google implemented its very own UI component model, introducing various new terms and concepts probably unfamiliar to most developers. Although well designed and powerful, it is unconventional, has a high learning curve and, in some respects, lacks sufficient documentation. Basic use cases may be quick to implement, but in order to develop more complex applications, a thorough understanding of Android’s UI component model is essential.
This series aims at providing this understanding while focusing on the UI related concepts of activities and tasks.
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