When I upgraded my Blackberry for an Android G1 last December I was hoping to get stuck in with some Android development as soon as possible. 9 months later and I’m finally getting around to it! My initial impressions of the development platform are good. There is great documentation, and lots of sample applications.

One of the best sample applications I’ve found is WhereAreMyFriends, which uses the phone’s location awareness and Google Maps integration to display your location and that of everyone in your phone book.

Getting WhereAreMyFriends up and running the with 1.5 simulator is a little tricky, but this guide runs through the required steps.

Now that I’ve finally started writing some code for the Android I’ll be writing some posts on the subject. If anybody has any suggestions on any specifics they’d like me to write about let me know!

The Blackberry’s ButtonField doesn’t allow much customisation of how it looks. It is grey when not selected, and when selected it is highlighted. The highlight colour depends on the current theme. The image below shows a ButtonField in the unselected state, and in the selected state with different themes.

Because the ButtonField doesn’t allow you to customise its appearance you must create your own custom field if you wish to do so. My CustomButtonField class below is almost identical to the standard ButtonField, only it allows you to specify the the highlight colour. It also displays the text in white even when the button isn’t selected

import net.rim.device.api.ui.Color;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.Field;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.Font;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.Graphics;

public class CustomButtonField extends Field
{

	private int backgroundColour = Color.GRAY;
	private int highlightColour;
	private int fieldWidth;
	private int fieldHeight;
	private String text;
	private int padding = 8;

	public CustomButtonField(String text, int highlightColour)
	{
		super(Field.FOCUSABLE);
		this.text = text;
		this.highlightColour = highlightColour;
		Font defaultFont = Font.getDefault();
		fieldHeight = defaultFont.getHeight() + padding;
		fieldWidth = defaultFont.getAdvance(text) + (padding * 2);
		this.setPadding(2, 2, 2, 2);
	}

	protected boolean navigationClick(int status, int time)
	{
		fieldChangeNotify(1);
		return true;
	}

	protected void onFocus(int direction)
	{
		backgroundColour = highlightColour;
		invalidate();
	}

	protected void onUnfocus()
	{
		backgroundColour = Color.GRAY;
		invalidate();
	}

	public int getPreferredWidth()
	{
		return fieldWidth;
	}

	public int getPreferredHeight()
	{
		return fieldHeight;
	}

	protected void layout(int arg0, int arg1)
	{
		setExtent(getPreferredWidth(), getPreferredHeight());
	}

	protected void drawFocus(Graphics graphics, boolean on)
	{

	}

	protected void fieldChangeNotify(int context)
	{
		try
		{
			this.getChangeListener().fieldChanged(this, context);
		}
		catch (Exception e)
		{}
	}

	protected void paint(Graphics graphics)
	{
		graphics.setColor(backgroundColour);
		graphics.fillRoundRect(0, 0, fieldWidth, fieldHeight, 8, 8);
		graphics.setColor(Color.GRAY);
		graphics.drawRoundRect(0, 0, fieldWidth, fieldHeight, 8, 8);
		graphics.setColor(Color.WHITE);
		graphics.drawText(text, padding - 1, padding / 2 + 1);
	}
}

You can see the CustomButtonFieldin the image below, which shows it unselected and also selected with a highlight colour of 0×990099.

If you want to go beyond changing the colours of your buttons then Jonathan Fisher has written up details of a custom BigButtonField that  uses images, allowing you to create some really great looking buttons.

The standard Blackberry API provides lots of useful UI components, known as fields. The BitmapField can be used to display an image. Recently I’ve needed to display images from the web, so I created the WebBitmapField class.

Anyone who’s done any Blackberry programming knows that getting data off the web can be a bit of a pain. It must be done in a background thread, which must then pass the result back to the UI thread. I’ve created a simple method called getWebData that handles all of this for me. The result is passed back to a WebDataCallback interface:

public interface WebDataCallback
{
	public void callback(String data);
}

getWebData is a static method in my Utils class:

public static void getWebData(final String url, final WebDataCallback callback) throws IOException
{
	Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable()
	{
		public void run()
		{
			HttpConnection connection = null;
			InputStream inputStream = null;

			try
			{
				connection = (HttpConnection) Connector.open(url, Connector.READ, true);
				inputStream = connection.openInputStream();
				byte[] responseData = new byte[10000];
				int length = 0;
				StringBuffer rawResponse = new StringBuffer();
				while (-1 != (length = inputStream.read(responseData)))
				{
					rawResponse.append(new String(responseData, 0, length));
				}
				int responseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
				if (responseCode != HttpConnection.HTTP_OK)
				{
					throw new IOException("HTTP response code: "
							+ responseCode);
				}

				final String result = rawResponse.toString();
				UiApplication.getUiApplication().invokeLater(new Runnable()
				{
					public void run()
					{
						callback.callback(result);
					}
				});
			}
			catch (final Exception ex)
			{
				UiApplication.getUiApplication().invokeLater(new Runnable()
				{
					public void run()
					{
						callback.callback("Exception (" + ex.getClass() + "): " + ex.getMessage());
					}
				});
			}
			finally
			{
				try
				{
					inputStream.close();
					inputStream = null;
					connection.close();
					connection = null;
				}
				catch(Exception e){}
			}
		}
	});
	t.start();
}

The WebBitmapField that makes use of the getWebData method is below. All you need to do is pass a URL to the constructor and it’ll load the image:

public class WebBitmapField extends BitmapField implements WebDataCallback
{
	private EncodedImage bitmap = null;

	public WebBitmapField(String url)
	{
		try
		{
			Util.getWebData(url, this);
		}
		catch (Exception e) {}
	}

	public Bitmap getBitmap()
	{
		if (bitmap == null) return null;
		return bitmap.getBitmap();
	}

	public void callback(final String data)
	{
		if (data.startsWith("Exception")) return;

		try
		{
			byte[] dataArray = data.getBytes();
			bitmap = EncodedImage.createEncodedImage(dataArray, 0,
					dataArray.length);
			setImage(bitmap);
		}
		catch (final Exception e){}
	}
}

Hopefully the WebBitmapField class will be of use to some Blackberry developers. Feel free to use it in your applications.

Google have recently released their mobile phone software stack Android. I’ve had a quick look over some of the documentation, and so far I’m really impressed. It seems to give developers quite low level control over mobile devices, and supports loads of features:

• Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
• Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
• Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
• Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
• SQLite for structured data storage
• Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
• GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
• Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
• Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
• Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

What’s more, Google are offering $10 million in awards as part of the Android Developer Challenge! This YouTube video shows off some of the cool features: