Android Development: Day Four
Today was a long day to not get much accomplished. I was only able to complete one chapter in the book but did finish four laps. In todays chapter we covered a few topics that didn't really flow together but covered a lot of functionality.
The book covered Intents, Broadcast receivers, adapters and internet connectivity in the chapter and we had labs for three of the items. An intent seems to be the way you launch a sub-view and retrieve data from that view. In the lab we created a simple app that had a button that launched the contact list screen. User clicks on a contact and their name is displayed on the original screen. This felt a lot like magic so I went back over this section to figure out how it launched the correct sub-view.
An adapter is just overriding the default display so you can customize the view. This was a simple change made for the to do list app adding task and created date onto the screen. We did not have a lab yet for broadcast receivers but it seems to be kind of like system wide event listener. Lastly we covered internet as the app I built in the lab parsed an xml http response and displayed the data in a list view. Besides some complex debugging, the application was easy enough to build. There was more code parsing the xml than anything else.
So far I'm seeing a lot more xml being modified than actual code in the apps. I'm curious how many actual lines of code some of these applications are actually requiring. It feels like a lot more xml is required. Debugging the app was extremely hard as well. I was not able to create a simple junit and had to run a special junit to test the code. I still have no idea where my debug statements end up as I do not see a log file being written anywhere. There is still a lot to learn about this platform I'm wondering what I can and can't do.
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