Saturday, March 28, 2015

PIN Screen Library for Android

Here's a simple and easy implementation for adding PIN lock support for your Android apps. The library can be themed with your app theme colors. It has smooth animations and vibrate cues when something's wrong.


To use this, you just have to write about 10 lines of code, including layouts and everything. It's so simple.

Steps to implement
  • Add as dependency
      Maven:
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.kbeanie</groupId>
    <artifactId>pinscreenlibrary</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>
       Android Studio:
compile 'com.kbeanie:pinscreenlibrary:1.0.0@aar' 
  • Add PinView to your layout file. 
<com.kbeanie.pinscreenlibrary.views.PinView
    android:id="@+id/pinView"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" />
  • Initialize PinView in two modes 
pinView.setModeSetup(PinEntrySetupListener);
pinView.setModeAuthenticate(PinEntryAuthenticationListener)

And finally, handle the callbacks for all events. The complete source code for this project can be found on Github. Let me know if you have any queries or issues. I would be happy to resolve them. 

Thursday, November 20, 2014

New Sensors in Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

I found a few non-documented sensors on Lollipop (Android 5.0) on a Nexus 5.

Tried looking for them, but could't find any documentation on them on. Looks like they are mostly software sensors.

Android app on Google PlayHere's the list that I have found. I have written a simple app that displays all the sensors and shows there values. Not to mention that, only for the ones that are documented. For the ones not documented, you can only see it's details.

There are only a few which appear on developer.android.com.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement.

New types of sensors

In Android 5.0, a new tilt detector sensor helps improve activity recognition on supported devices, and a heart rate sensor reports the heart rate of the person touching the device.
New interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions such as a wake up gesture, a pick upgesture, and a glance gesture.

Since there's no documentation, for some of them, I don't really know what they do. The only thing that gives you a clue is the sensor name. And, I don't know how to work with them as well.


Tilt Detector


AMD Sensor (No idea, whats that)


RMD Sensor (No idea, whats that)


Basic Gestures Sensor


Tap Sensor


Facing Sensor


Tilt Sensor


Pedometer


Pedestrian Activity Monitor

Update: Seems, the documentation is coming soon. XDA picked this up.


Friday, June 20, 2014

Easy Swipe to Refresh in Android

Swipe to Refresh Android
Recently, Google released a new version of the Support Library, which has an interesting component. It's called SwipeRefreshLayout. With that, it's become a child's play to implement a quick Swipe-to-Refresh control for your apps.

A few things first

  1. Available only with android-support-v13. Which means that only apps target SDK level 13 and above can use this.
  2. It can only contain one scrollable direct child such as a ListView or a ScrollView.
That's all you need to know. Well.. A few things more, basically some xml and java code.

For this example, we use a ListView with some demo data. Once the list view is scrolled, we do some task, wait for sometime, and update the list view's adapter. Finally, ask the SwipeRefreshLayout to stop the progress indicator, since we are done with refreshing.

The layout file
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    tools:context="${packageName}.${activityClass}" >
    <android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout
        android:id="@+id/swipeLayout"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent" >
        <ListView
            android:id="@+id/listView"
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="match_parent" >
        </ListView>
    </android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout>
</RelativeLayout>
The UI initialization
private void initializeViews() {
refreshLayout = (SwipeRefreshLayout) findViewById(R.id.swipeLayout);
refreshLayout.setOnRefreshListener(this);
                // The default colors for the progress bar are not so nice.
setColorSchemeForProgressBar();
ListView listView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.listView);
adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,
android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1);
adapter.addAll(getDemoData(5));
listView.setAdapter(adapter);
  }
The Refresh Task
       @Override
public void onRefresh() {
Log.i(TAG, "Refresh Requested");
doRefresh();
}
// Fetch data and update listview's adapter
private void doRefresh() {
RefreshTask task = new RefreshTask();
task.execute((Void) null);
The Completion Work
private void postRefreshComplete() {
// Stop the refresh animation
refreshLayout.setRefreshing(false);
// Update adapter with new data
adapter.clear();
adapter.addAll(getDemoData(new Random().nextInt(20)));
adapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
   }

And there you go, a simple swipe to refresh usage for your Android apps. You can find the whole source code here