Do it yourself Android

We’ll be using 

• the foursquare-api-java to do the actual Foursquare calls.
• the Google APIs Client Library for Java to help us out with the OAuth 2.0 flow

I’ve decided to use the foursquare-api-java, a project hosted at Google Code, as it offers a rich interface to interact with Foursquare. The same API calls are possible through the Google API client for Java, but it would require you to write your own model classes to do the JSON to Java translation.
I will post some sample code here on how this can be done with the Google APIs client library for java.

In the sample application hosted at Github, we’re going to display a map where the user can select a location. Upon selecting a location, we’ll load up a list of Foursquare venues that the user can select.
Upon selecting a venue, we’ll return to our map, put a marker on the map representing the venue, and allow the user to perform a checkin.

• the Google Latitude API as a sample Google API (one that has recently received Oauth 2.0 support)
• the Google APIs Client Library for Java to help us out with the OAuth 2.0 flow
• the Latitude client library to interact with the Latitude API.

In the sample application, we’re going to execute 1 authorized API call to the Latitude API. The call will return the current location of the user.

You can create a test user associated with a particular app using the Graph API with your app access token.

https://graph.facebook.com/APP_ID/accounts/test-users?

  installed=true
  &permissions=read_stream
  &method=post
  &access_token=APP_ACCESS_TOKEN

• setup a Faceook test account
• register a Facebook application
• authenticate the user in your Android application.
• have the user update his Facebook wall from your Android application.

This guide is accompanied  by a sample application that’s available in Github in the AndroidFacebookSample repository. To import this project in Eclipse, I suggest using the EGit plugin that can be installed via the Main P2 Repository located at http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates.

Important note : As an update to this article, I’ve prepared a new post entitled Improved Twitter OAuth for Android focussing on a more simple Oauth / Android experience, and using the Google APIs Client Library for Java.

• setup a twitter test account
• register a twitter application
• authenticate the user in your Android application.
• have the user send tweets from your Android application.

This guide is accompanied  by a sample application that’s available in Github in the AndroidTwitterSample repository. To import this project in Eclipse, I suggest using the EGit plugin that can be installed via the Main P2 Repository located at http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates.

Although it only takes a couple of steps to prepare your application for using Google Maps, failing to complete or skipping one of these steps can quickly turn this into an error-prone process.

The goal of this article is to go over the required steps in order to use Google Maps, and to list down the common mistakes that result in errors.

• The LocationManager provides access to the system location services
• The LocationListener is used for receiving notifications from the LocationManager when the location has changed

However, there seems to be some doubt regarding the minTime and minDistance parameters that can be provided to the requestLocationUpdates call, and the way the locationlistener behaves.