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Android Tutorial – Clickable Widgets

Terence Eden — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:09:42 +0000

Another quick Android tutorial. I couldn’t find an easy or correct method of launching a browser when you click on a homescreen widget. Well, here it is…

public class clickWidget extends AppWidgetProvider
{
@Override
public void onUpdate( Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds )
{
RemoteViews remoteViews =
new RemoteViews( context.getPackageName(), R.layout.widget );
remoteViews.setImageViewResource(R.id.ImageView01, drawableResourse);
ComponentName myWidget =
new ComponentName( context, clickWidget.class );
// Create an Intent to launch Browser
Intent intent =
new Intent(
Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://example.com")
);
PendingIntent pendingIntent =
PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, intent, 0);
remoteViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.ImageView01, pendingIntent);
appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget( myWidget, remoteViews);
}

I’ve used this as the basis of a demo widget – “MI5 Terror Threat Level”. The widget displays the UK’s Threat Level on your homescreen. Clicking on it takes you to the MI5 page discussing the threat level.

The threat level is determined by parsing the RSS that the security services so helpfully provide. At the moment, the widget keeps a local copy of the graphics because the RSS feed contains references to “localhost” images.

You can download the widget by scanning in this QR code.

MI5 Widget - QR Code

Browser Statistics of 10 Downing Street

Terence Eden — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:58:32 +0000

It’s really difficult cutting through the hype to see which browsers one should support when designing a website. There are many different measures of popularity – but many sites are only visited by techies, or only ever visited when at work, or are skewed towards the young or the old.

Yesterday morning I asked the Number 10 Downing Street web team if they could provide their statistics. I figured that the PM’s website gets enough readers from a wide selection of the web community to give a fairly impartial measure of the popular web browsers.

Here’s their (very quick) reply

DowningStreet

(DowningStreet)

@edent Top are: IE7 22%, IE8 20%, IE6 12%, Firefox3.5.3 9%, FF3.5.2 7%, FF3.0.14 5%, FF3.0.13 4%, Safari 4.0.3 4%, Chrome 2.0.172.43 2%

On 2-10-2009 09:46:44 from web in reply to Terence Eden

Or, to express it graphically…

Chart Showing Browser Stats

Firefox overall accounts for 25% – a fairly strong showing. But with IE6 stubbornly stuck at 12%, it will be a while before we can consign it to the dustbin of web history.
Opera is languishing in the 15% marked as “Other” along with my browser of choice, Lynx.

Review: Opera Mini 5 Beta – BlackBerry

Terence Eden — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:14:24 +0000

(Disclaimer, I work for Vodafone Group who do a lot of work with Opera. These are my personal views.)

The regular BlackBerry browser is… how can I put this politely… sub-optimal. For reading mobile-friendly sites it’s perfectly adequate – but for anything more complex it tends to choke.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s “good enough” for most basic browsing needs, but a lack of tabs, half-arsed JavaScript implementation and idiosyncratic rendering choices make for a somewhat frustrating browsing experience.

Enter Opera Mini 5 (beta). Opera has been knocking around for ages. Their desktop browser is solid and their mobile browser has always been rated highly. But how does it compare to the BlackBerry’s native browser? Let’s find out!

The Good

Opera Mini 5 beta

From the first launch you can tell that a lot of care an attention has gone in to Opera Mini. The startup screen has visual bookmarks – AKA speed-dials.

Start Page

There’s an impressive amount of animation – similar to App World – and the user interface is fairly snappy.

The new menu bar gives quick access to all the functions Opera has to offer.

New Menu Bar

Extended Menu Bar

Pages start in “Zoomed Out” mode so you can get an overview of the page.

BBC News - Zoomed Out

A click of the track ball zooms in. Here you can see how well the text and images are rendered.

Zoomed In

Tabbed Browsing

Opera Mini handles tabs wonderfully. Because Opera sets itself as the default browser – any link you click on in an email is opened in a new tab in Opera.

Lots of tabs

Closing Tabs

Text Selection

The native browser is very good at text selection – so is Opera.

Text Selection

Text Selection Instructions

Highlighted Text

Copy and Search

The Bad

Missing Letters

As you can see, there is a missing letter on this page.

Spot The Missing Letters

This happens across websites with no seeming pattern other than the last letter on a line.

No YouTube

The native BlackBerry browser passes YouTube links to the media player.

YouTube? What's That?

Opera doesn’t do anything with the links. I didn’t expect it to have a fully-fledge flash player – but the least it could do is pass streaming media to the in built application that will handle it.

Poor Text Entry

The text boxes look nice, but have serious flaws.

Poor Text Entry

They don’t respect the normal BlackBery conventions. There’s no auto-correction, holding down a letter doesn’t capitalise it. Sometimes hitting delete removes all the text. This is infuriating.

Miscellaneous

There are a collection of things which prevent me loving Opera Mini 5 (Beta).

Lack of standard BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts. I can’t press K for Bookmarks, P for Page Address, nor T to jump to the Top of the page.
Inability to send links. If I’m reading an interesting page on the BlackBerry browser, I can send it via email or SMS – no way to do that with Opera.
Can’t open links in a new tab. I know it’s a bit churlish to complain when tabs are a new feature.
Clicking “Back” returns you to the top of the previous page – not you last position on the previous page.

Conclusion

There are some annoying faults in Opera Mini 5 (beta) – but the clue is in the name – it’s a beta. The browsing experience is so good, I can gloss over the missing letters and the poor text entry.

The fast rendering and tabbed browsing are enough to keep me using it for now. Looks like RIM purchased Torch Mobile just in time!