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 Redux using Notifications


You're probably already familiar with Notifications as they've become a prominent feature (even making their way to the desktop environment) and for good reason. They provide an excellent means to send information to your user. They provide the least intrusive option of all the alerts and notification options available.

As we saw in the first recipe, Lights, Action, and Sound – getting the user's attention!, lights, vibration, and sound are all very useful for getting the user's attention. That's why the Notification object includes support for all three methods, as we'll demonstrate in this recipe. Given this ability to get your user's attention, care should still be taken not to abuse your user. Otherwise, they'll likely uninstall your app. It's generally a good idea to give your users the option to enable/disable notifications and even how to present the notification—with sound or without, and so on.

Getting ready

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