#android examples

[pranayairan]

Adding Help overlay to your android app

For a developer developing android app, it is often a problem to explain features and functionalists of app. Users who downloads this apps often find them self clueless about what they can do with app and how to do certain actions. There are many ways in which this problems were address, to make user understand the functionality and working of apps developers have find out many ways, mainly 

Putting a introduction screen where a new user flips through different functionality and features about the app like magazine (ANY.DO, Clear)

Putting up Help overlays or Coach marks on different screens explaining first time users what they do when they are at specif screen in the app (Pulse, ES file explorer )

First one got popular with TODO apps like Any.Do, Clear etc using it, it is not the best practice to use this approach

Second approach is more usable compare to first. Lets see how we can create Coach marks/Overlays on the top of android apps and helps user to discover app functionality.

Overlay can be simply achieved by putting up 2 layouts on the top of each other, In android this can be done by using Framelayout. Lets follow steps mention by Mark Murphy on this post at stackoverflow

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10216937/how-do-i-create-a-help-overlay-like-you-see-in-a-few-android-apps-and-ics.

By the end of this tutorial, we will have a example Alarm application with Coach marks like this

               Step #1: 

// Create a new framelayout so that we can associate child layouts with it      

final FrameLayout overlayFramelayout = new FrameLayout(getApplicationContext());

//Set the framelayout as root layout in your activity

setContentView(overlayFramelayout);

Step #2:

//Get the reference of your main layout and inflate it to frame layout

View view = getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.activity_help_overlay, overlayFramelayout,false);

overlayFramelayout.addView(view);

Step #3: 

// inflate overlay layout and add it to frame layout

View overlay_view = getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.overlay_view, overlayFramelayout,false);

overlayFramelayout.addView(overlay_view);

This will give us the Coach marks/Overlay on the main layout. Now we want to have functionality to remove this Help Overlay when users tap or perform some action, this can be done by removing overlay view from framelayout

Step #4

overlayFramelayout.removeView(overlay_view);

Complete working example along with source code of this tutorial is available on Github https://github.com/pranayairan/AndroidExamples/tree/master/AndroidHelpOverlay

Let me know if this helps in comments, suggest for topics on future android tutorials

[pranayairan]

Shipping sqllite db with your app

Yesterday I came across a question in linkedin where some one wants to import a excel sheet into android sqllite db, it was simple, export it into CSV and use any tool like sqllite browser to import it as table. 

Interestingly one also want to use there own custom database ship with the android app, it is simple to ship your own db with android app, after this post you will able to ship your db with your android app. The code for this tutorial is available on github

First Download sqllite browser and create a new sqllite db

Now create a new table android_metadata with only 1 column locale

Insert en_us as data for this column

Import any other table as CSV which you want to put in this db

Save the database

This steps are essential as all android db which gets created has default table android_metadata, since we are manually creating this db we have to make sure about this table. 

Now Open eclipse and create a new project, Copy newly created db and put it into Asset folder of your project 

Once This is done use this code

https://gist.github.com/3489486

This code has helper methods which will be used for copying database. Once you created the above class in your android app, in your main activity call this method

 DataBaseHelper mydatabaseHelper = new DataBaseHelper(this);

This method will copy database from your asset folder to your android app system folder. Once this is done you can get reference of database using 

 mydatabaseHelper.openDataBase();

This will give you reference of the db, now you can use this as you use normal db reference, you can run query on this, insert or create tables etc.

Working example using above code can be downloaded from My Github repo https://github.com/pranayairan/AndroidExamples