Android App for setting up devices

I started this last week sometime before the hackathon and finally got back on to it tonight. Most of my Android programming has been purely native C++, so setting up a UI is causing a bit of pain.

The first couple of screens are fine, actually the third screen is now, I click something and it loads up a new Intent. The first screen is just buttons, the second screens fetches devices that are not setup and displays those.

When a device that hasn’t been setup has been selected then the next screen pops up. I already know how to pass data from one activity to another so that’s not the problem. The issue at the moment is the UI layout. The first attempt threw all the widgets to the top of the display when it was run. Then I realised I needed to setup things up using layouts. So far so good, I’ve got all my inputs, some with buttons next to the text input field.

Most of my UI stuff has been laying stuff out and then resizing everything to the display and accounting for the aspect ratio. This is alien to me but I am getting used to it as I go along.

I know that on Android I can also use portrait and landscape modes, to which I haven’t yet sussed out yet, but I do know they use fragments. I’ll get to that soon enough.

The Android app is simple enough anyway, so there’s little need to fancy it up. It needs to do a few jobs only. And they are all using a basic UI and no graphics (yet).

There’s no time tonight to do the communication between the app and the server, but essentially it will assign the device to an area and a category and give it a name.

The following step from this will be assigning the playlist, which, erm, I do want to use thumbnails for.

EDIT:

Using the putExtra, I’ve sent the stuff I need to the new UI screen. I’ve done that before so it was easy this time.

Posted in android.