Getting Published in the Play Store (Google Apps)

[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Well, this went far more smoothly than I had anticipated. At the XE5 World Tour event in Auckland, Brian Hamilton, creator of the iWD app, told us that getting his approved took about a week (if I recall correctly), and he had to submit a video showing how his app worked, so I was anticipating a couple of days at least to get my widget published. A couple of hours is all it took !

Developing an AppWidget – Part 5

[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] In my previous post I explained how I believed I had solved a problem with my widget, only to discover that it created a different problem in the process. I had believed that IntentService based services were long-lived, but in fact this is not the case. However, the change remains valid for solving the problem of my update alarm surviving device sleep, leaving only the question of how to refactor the behaviour that using an IntentService had broken.

Developing an AppWidget – Part 4

[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Keep On Running… Some may have noticed that I updated my previous post with a footnote describing an issue with my battery widget not resuming it’s updates after the phone went into (and came out of) deep sleep. I got to the bottom of that and can now happily report that my widget seems 100% reliable and the solution is not contributing to any additional battery drain. This is what I did…

Importing an Android Class For Use in Delphi

[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In a previous post I noted the absence of the BatteryManager class in the AndroidAPI.JNI units. This class contains some constants useful when reading battery information. I showed how to use a suitably massaged literal in place of these missing constants, but in response to observations from Paul and Brian decided to look at how to import the missing class itself.

To init() or Not to Init(), That is the Correction

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] The short answer is: Yes, init() In a previous post I lamented the fact [cough – Ed] that some Java class imports appeared to support the underlying Java constructors via an init() method, where others did not. This wasn’t a “fact” at all. It was a misunderstanding based on an incomplete grasp of the machinations of the Java class import mechanism in the AndroidAPI units.

Getting the Battery Level on Android With Delphi

[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] Over the past few days I posted a two part series showing how to obtain the current battery level as part of the implementation of an Android AppWidget using Oxygene. As far as I can tell AppWidgets simply aren’t possible using Delphi but reading the battery is quite straightforward Android SDK work, and I thought a comparison of the Oxygene and Delphi equivalents might be interesting.