Improved Copy/Paste in Gingerbread

It's really important for the copy/paste feature to work on a mobile even if you don't have a mouse to select text you want to copy. Apple's implementation is nice. Till Froyo, there wasn't a unified concept of copy/paste feature implemented. But, the Gingerbread has actually changed a few things :) . Copying phone numbers from your mails and email addresses from web pages should be trivial and should involve the least amount of button presses. Prior to Gingerbread, this wasn't the case, but Gingerbread has this "New Feature now".

Here's the link where you can find out more about this.

Some images and videos

Official documentation

You need to double-tap on the text before you can bring up the text selection controls. Once you are done with the selection, single tap on the text copies the selected text to the clipboard, and then you can extract the data from the clipboard. This is really nice. Else, you would have to write a bit of extra code to trigger text selection mode first. This copy/paste selector works on an EditText and on the Browser. I haven't tested it further.


Gingerbread Stuff!!!! **It works on the emulator**.

Gesture Detection on Android

I just got my gesture detection code working. It's a fun way and a convenient way as well to enhance the usability of your application. So, here is the code that gets you going. First, for the Activity that you want to detect gestures, the OnGestureListener interface has to be implemented. Then, you need to override the methods and implement them. And finally, you need to implement the onTouchEvent method of the activity that will trigger the gesture listener code.

   1: package com.beanie.androidco;

   2:  

   3: import android.app.Activity;

   4: import android.os.Bundle;

   5: import android.view.GestureDetector;

   6: import android.view.MotionEvent;

   7: import android.view.GestureDetector.OnGestureListener;

   8:  

   9: public class GestureDemo extends Activity implements OnGestureListener {

  10:     private GestureDetector gestureDetector;

  11:     @Override

  12:     public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

  13:         super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

  14:         setContentView(R.layout.main);

  15:         gestureDetector = new GestureDetector(this);

  16:     }

  17:  

  18:     @Override

  19:     public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {

  20:         return gestureDetector.onTouchEvent(event);

  21:     }

  22:  

  23:     @Override

  24:     public boolean onDown(MotionEvent e) {

  25:         // Do something

  26:         return false;

  27:     }

  28:  

  29:     @Override

  30:     public boolean onFling(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float velocityX,

  31:             float velocityY) {

  32:         // Do something

  33:         return false;

  34:     }

  35:  

  36:     @Override

  37:     public void onLongPress(MotionEvent e) { 

  38:         // Do something

  39:     }

  40:  

  41:     @Override

  42:     public boolean onScroll(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float distanceX,

  43:             float distanceY) {

  44:         // Do something

  45:         return false;

  46:     }

  47:  

  48:     @Override

  49:     public void onShowPress(MotionEvent e) { 

  50:         // Do something

  51:     }

  52:  

  53:     @Override

  54:     public boolean onSingleTapUp(MotionEvent e) { 

  55:         // Do something 

  56:         return false;

  57:     }

  58: }

The most commonly used method would probably be the onFling method, where you have to check for a threshold velocity and displacement before you would want to trigger an action. For detecting Left Fling, Right Fling, Scroll down/up, you will need to write some extra code in the corresponding methods. Enjoy...