Do it yourself Android

Not really a development post, but a video review of Latify (my app for Android). Video review was done by http://hemorrdroids.net. Enjoy….

In this article, I’m going to show you how you can implement an OAuth 2.0 flow in Android. We’ll be using  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.

Continue reading “Oauth 2.0 flow in Android” »

In this article, I’ll be showing you how to create a widget for the Android homescreen. Widgets can be useful to provide condensed information, without necessarily having to open your application. In addition to showing information, a widget can also be used to trigger certain actions related to your application. Instead of forcing the user to open up your application and navigating to a certain screen to perform an action, a widget can provide the user with a quick shortcut to that action. You can also dynamically change the layout of your widget (ex: when the user presses a button, the button can be highlighted, or a piece of text can altered). This article is accompanied by a sample android application that includes the widgets we’ll be discussing here.

Continue reading “Developing Android Home Screen Widgets” »

Today we’ll be looking at the Google APIs Client Library for Java.  The API is provided by Google, and is a flexible, efficient, and powerful Java client library for accessing any HTTP-based API’s on the web. According to Google, it is the recommended library for accessing Google API’s based on REST or JSON-RPC. One of the nice things about this library is that it fully supports the Android environment out of the box. So we’ll focus on those features in this article.

To avoid confusion, Google offers the following APIs (the first one being the topic of this post, and compatible with the Android platform) :

• Google APIs Client Library for Java (google-api-java-client)
• Google Data Java Client Library (gdata-java-client)

Unfortunately, there are no samples available that perform the OAuth dance in Android using this library, so I thought I’d write one myself. The code for this article can be found in the AndroidOauthGoogleApiJavaClient repository
Continue reading “OAuth in Android using the Google APIs Client Library for Java” »

Introduction

The goal of this article is to get Facebook integration up & running from your Android app in 30 minutes. The guide will show you how to 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.

Before running this project, make sure you change the com.ecs.android.facebook.Sample.AndroidFacebookSample file to include your Facebook API key (see subsequent section).
Once you have sample application up & running, you can copy the relevant classes into your projects to have Facebook up & running from your Android application.

First things first … In order to integrate with Facebook, you need 2 things :

• A Facebook test account, used in our Android application to login to Facebook and make status updates.
• A Facebook application, used to inform the user in your Android application that this application is requesting you to login to Facebook.

Continue reading “A 30 minute guide to integrating Facebook in your Android application” »

Continue reading “Debug a remote Android process in Eclipse” »