LocalGuide - A map application with home screen widget.

Spent a bit of my free time in finishing a app named localguide..I have uploaded in market....!! It is there in OVI store as well.( it was quite old).

if u like the description and preview ...Please buy it :) and give ur feedbacks/comments :) if any improvements i will make sure ur issues are addressed over updates...!!

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mani.localguide

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-C_rK2lrow&feature=feedu

And if u felt useful... plss fwd to ur friends...!!

Description:
How many times we get stuck in a new place and call our friends to get directions to pubs, restaurants nearby and still be in an endless search.
Localguide puts an end to all this endless searches.

* LocalGuide takes two short keywords and directs you to the place you want to go with detailed map directions.
* It provides you the complete addresses, phone numbers, maps location. It identifies your location using GPS or Wifi.
* Make a call instantly.
* Send SMS/message the result to your friends right away.
* Update twitter,facebook status with the result informing (where you are presently ).
* Get directions to the place with neat and simple step by step instructions with clear paths shown using google map view.
* Bookmark your favourite Places and store them for fast consultation when in offline usage

A LITTLE ANIMATIONS are added during screen transitions.

Home Screen Widgets:

Localguide provides one of the interesting additional features is home screen widgets which has

* Support for 4x1 and 4x2 resolutions. Please see the previews.
* Provides instant results of your interested categories around your current location in home screen.
* Widgets has the capability to keep listening for your movement and detects the location automatically and refreshes the results.
* If in case you dont want to scan for your location movement, you quickly turn of the MOVEMENT DETECTION button on the widget.
* Multiple widgets can be added to display results for different categories.
EX: One widgets collects results for restuarants, one collects for theatres.
* Widgets provides an one button click option for calling and sharing through sms.
* Also provided favorite button which takes you to the favorites page to quickly get to your favorite destination.

Widgets are handly and quite useful. 4x1 and 4x2 gives you an option to keep your widgets compact at necessary place in workspace.

Any improvements pls mail me - smanikandan14@gmail.com

How to perform entry animations for listview.

From my work related learnings, i would like to share the three ways of doing entry animation for listview elements.


1 - LayoutAnimation Controller
This controller is viewgroup animation controller means, it will apply animation to each of the child added to a view group. When this controller is set to the listview
it animates each listviews items. So that you can have entry animation for listview.

But the drawback is this controller will apply the animation to the listview items only for very first time this layout is drawn/shown. The next time when you do
hide / show the layout, you cannot expect the listview to have its element animated.

2 - So the second approach i tried is over riding the onvisibilitychanged() api of Layout class where your listview is added.check for visibility,if someone made the layout visible then this the right place to perform the animation on each views of listview. Use getChildAt() api to get the listview items and start a animation on each view. So you get a entry animation for listview whenever, this layout is made visible. You can also write a exit animation and start when visibility == INVISIBLE

	protected void onVisibilityChanged (View changedView, int visibility)

	{

		super.onVisibilityChanged(changedView,visibility);

		if(visibility == View.VISIBLE) {

			startEnterAnimation();

		}

	}

	

	public void startEnterAnimation() {

		

	Animation animation;

        int offsetTime=0;

        for(int i=0;i    		View view = list.getChildAt(i);

    		animation = new AlphaAnimation(0.0f,1.0f);

    		animation.setFillAfter(true);

    		animation.setDuration(100);

    		animation.setStartOffset( i * 100);



    		if(view != null)

    		{

    			view.startAnimation(animation);

    		}

    	  }

       }

There is also a limitation in the second approach. Scenario is, what happens before u perform the animation on the listview,there is a change in the data, where in you need to call the notifydatasetchanged api, then u wanted to start the entry animation.
But by the time you start performing the entry animation, notifydatasetchagned api would have layouted out the listview elements.

So we need to start the animation as and when listview items are drawn on the screen. how do we do this ??

Third approach solves this issue.

3 - In the adapter's getview() api, as and when we return the convertView to the framework, start the animation that instance by checiking for a flag,
which will be set to true for the first time listview is shown. Approach looks good, but how do u know when the listview has finished calling all its getview
and drawn its child so that you can make the flag false ??. Here is the solution i have tried, as soon as notifydatasetchanged api is called,

UI thread will have tasks in its messagequeue to perform getview for the count returned by getCount() adapter.so after notifydatasetchanged api is called,
get the handler of listview(which is nothing but UI thread handler) and post a runnable to make the boolean flag false, So that this runnable will be
executed after all the getview() calls are finished for all its child elements. So We know when to make the boolean false at the right instance.

	protected void onVisibilityChanged (View changedView, int visibility)

	{

		super.onVisibilityChanged(changedView,visibility);

		if(visibility == View.VISIBLE) {

                // Suppose your data is upadted.

				mListAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();

				isInitialLayout = true;

				listview.getHandler().post(new Runnable() {

					public void run() {

						isInitialLayout = false;

					}

				});

        }

     }

	    public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {

	        ViewHolder holder;

	        if (convertView == null) {

	            convertView = mInflater.inflate(R.layout.listview_item, null);

	            holder = new ViewHolder();

	            holder.title = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.title);

	            convertView.setTag(holder);

	        } else {

	            holder = (ViewHolder) convertView.getTag();

	        }



	        holder.title.setText(mData.get(position));



            /* Start the animation for this item for the position */

           if(isInitialLayout == true ) {

	    		Animation animation = new AlphaAnimation(0.0f,1.0f);

	    		animation.setFillAfter(true);

	    		animation.setDuration(100);

	    		animation.setStartOffset(position * 100);

	    		convertView.startAnimation(animation);

           }

	        

	        return convertView;

	    }

If there are any other ways of performing the entry animation for a listview in a layout, please let me/everybody know :)

How to calculate lsitview's total element's height

Sometimes we would be interested in finding height of the listview including all the child's height.(including the child which are not visible )

Usually the api listview.getChildCount() returns the count of number of elements which can be seen in the listview's height. But what i am insisting now is finding the height of all the childs of listview a collective height.

we will see how can we find the collective height of all child.

- Get the adapter instance from the listview.
- Get the count of adapter.
- And use adapter's getView(int position,View view,ViewGroup parent) api to get the view instance of all child
elements.
- Then use the measure api of View to measure the height of the view as below. I used here UNSPECIFIED to find out how big the view is.
- This api measures the widht and height. And use the getMeasuredHeight() api to find
the Measured Height.

 private int getTotalHeightofListView() {

     	ListAdapter mAdapter = listview.getAdapter();

     	int listviewElementsheight = 0;

    	for(int i =0;i        	View mView  = mAdapter.getView(i, null, listview);

        	mView.measure(MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(0, MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED), 

        			MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(0, MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED));

        	listviewElementsheight+= mView.getMeasuredHeight();

    	}

    	return listviewElementsheight;

}

For additional information on MeasureSpec, taken from
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html

MeasureSpecs are used to push requirements down the tree from parent to child. A MeasureSpec can be in one of three modes:



UNSPECIFIED: This is used by a parent to determine the desired dimension of a child view. For example, a LinearLayout may call measure() on its child with the height set to UNSPECIFIED and a width of EXACTLY 240 to find out how tall the child view wants to be given a width of 240 pixels.

EXACTLY: This is used by the parent to impose an exact size on the child. The child must use this size, and guarantee that all of its descendants will fit within this size.

AT_MOST: This is used by the parent to impose a maximum size on the child. The child must gurantee that it and all of its descendants will fit within this size."

How to perform exit animation for listview

Some would like to perform animations on list elements when listview is being made hidden or when listview is set to View.INVISIBLE, View.GONE.This is what i term it as "Exit animation of listview."

- listview has an api getChildCount() this will tell you how many number of list view elements are visible on screen and 'getChildAt(int)' api will give you the listview elements View instance.

- Get the childcount and iterate through the loop and get each child view instance and start a animation on each views, you will see a exit animation performed on it.

Below example shows how to perform alpha animation from 1 to 0, disappearing elements one by one from top to bottom.

public void startExitAnimation() {

		

	Animation animation;

	listcount = gridview.getChildCount();

	int offsetTime=0;

	animatedcount = 0;

	for(int i=0;i	{

		View view = gridview.getChildAt(i);

		animation = new AlphaAnimation(1.0f,0.0f);

		animation.setAnimationListener(mExitAnimationListener);

		animation.setFillAfter(true);

		animation.setDuration(100);

		animation.setStartOffset( i * 100);



		if(view != null)

		{

			view.startAnimation(animation);

		}

	}

}

How to detect which is the current top activity.

Here is one of the way you can detect

 public boolean whatIsCurrentActivity()
 {
  ActivityManager am = (ActivityManager) mContext.getSystemService(mContext.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
  List ActivityManager.RunningTaskInfo taskInfo = am.getRunningTasks(1);
                if(taskInfo != null ){
                     System.out.println("Top activity - Package name of the process is "+taskInfo.get(0).topActivity.getPackageName() );
        }

Inent-filter to listen for internet/data connectivity status

When designing home screen widgets which tries to talk to cloud, we might be interested in knowing internet connectivity status of device. Suppoese when adding widget, data connectivity might not be available, but your would expect your widget to start collecting data, as and when device is connected to internet.

1- Check for internet connectivity / data connectivity.

 private boolean checkInternetConnection() {

  ConnectivityManager conMgr = (ConnectivityManager) mContext.getSystemService (mContext.CONNECTIVITY_SERVICE);

  // ARE WE CONNECTED TO THE NET

  if (conMgr.getActiveNetworkInfo() != null
  && conMgr.getActiveNetworkInfo().isAvailable()
  && conMgr.getActiveNetworkInfo().isConnected()) {
   return true;
  } else {
   return false;
  }

 } 

2 - To receive for Internet Connectivity dropped / up, listen for
'ConnectivityManager.CONNECTIVITY_ACTION' action.

       IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter();
        filter.addAction(ConnectivityManager.CONNECTIVITY_ACTION);
        mContext.registerReceiver(mNetworkStateIntentReceiver, filter);

3 - Whenever there is a change in connectivity i.e it could be either data connection is connected or disconnected, you will receive this event as broadcast, so in onreceive of the broadcast receiver, please check for internetconnect connection and decide whether internet is up or down.

   BroadcastReceiver mNetworkStateIntentReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
            @Override
            public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
                if (intent.getAction().equals(
                        ConnectivityManager.CONNECTIVITY_ACTION)) {

                    NetworkInfo info = intent.getParcelableExtra(
                            ConnectivityManager.EXTRA_NETWORK_INFO);
                    String typeName = info.getTypeName();
                    String subtypeName = info.getSubtypeName();
                     System.out.println("Network is up ******** "+typeName+":::"+subtypeName);

                    if( checkInternetConnection()== true )
                    {
                           "Decide your code logic here...."
                     }
                }
            }

};

How to dismiss your non-modal dialog, when touched outside dialog region

When you implement your dialog as non-modal dialog, means when your dialog is shown, you can interact with other elements on the screen, in such case, you might be interested to dismiss the dialog, when user touches/press/interacts with other elments on the screen. The following steps will help you to reeceive for the touch events outside your non-modal dialog.

1 - Set the flag-FLAG_NOT_TOUCH_MODAL for your dialog's window attribute

  Window window = this.getWindow();
  window.setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_NOT_TOUCH_MODAL,
  WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_NOT_TOUCH_MODAL);

2 - Add another flag to windows properties,, FLAG_WATCH_OUTSIDE_TOUCH - this one is for dialog to receive touch event outside its visible region.

3 - Override onTouchEvent() of dialog and check for action type. if the action type is
'MotionEvent.ACTION_OUTSIDE' means, user is interacting outside the dialog region. So in this case, you can dimiss your dialog or decide what you wanted to perform.

 public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event)
 {
  
        if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_OUTSIDE){
         System.out.println("TOuch outside the dialog ******************** ");
                this.dismiss();
        }
        return false;
 }