Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Kyle Mew
Book Image

Android Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Kyle Mew

Overview of this book

The Android OS has the largest installation base of any operating system in the world; there has never been a better time to learn Android development to write your own applications, or to make your own contributions to the open source community! This “cookbook” will make it easy for you to jump to a topic of interest and get what you need to implement the feature in your own application. If you are new to Android and learn best by “doing,” then this book will provide many topics of interest. Starting with the basics of Android development, we move on to more advanced concepts, and we’ll guide you through common tasks developers struggle to solve. The first few chapters cover the basics including Activities, Layouts, Widgets, and the Menu. From there, we cover fragments and data storage (including SQLite), device sensors, the camera, and GPS. Then we move on more advanced topics such as graphics and animation (including OpenGL), multi-threading with AsyncTask, and Internet functionality with Volley. We’ll also demonstrate Google Maps and Google Cloud Messaging (also known as Push Notifications) using the Google API Library. Finally, we’ll take a look at several online services designed especially for Android development. Take your application big-time with full Internet web services without having to become a server admin by leveraging the power of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Android Application Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Lights, Action, and Sound – getting the user's attention!


Most of the recipes in this chapter use the Notification object to alert your users, so this recipe will show an alternative approach for when you don't actually need a notification.

As the recipe title implies, we're going to use lights, action, and sound:

  • Lights: Normally, you'd use the LED device, but that is only available through the Notification object, which we'll demonstrate later in the chapter. Instead we'll take this opportunity to use setTorchMode() (added in API 23—Android 6.0), to use the camera flash as a flashlight. (Note: as you'll see in the code, this feature will only work on an Android 6.0 device with a camera flash.)

  • Action: We'll vibrate the phone.

  • Sound: We'll use the RingtoneManager to play the default notification sound.

As you'll see, the code for each of these is quite simple.

As demonstrated in the following Lights, Action, and Sound Redux using Notifications recipe, all three options: LED, vibrate, and sounds...