Make your Android App support all 3 screen sizes in 3 easy steps!

If you just want your app to work with minimal effort and minimal time you can let the OS handle your layouts for you.
It may not be the most optimized view on all 3 screen sizes but in my experience it's enough to get the app to work effectively until you can go back and pretty it up.

Step 1 - Set your app to compile with android 1.6

To do this in eclipse right click on your project in the Package Explorer and select properties.
Click on Android on the left pane. and then check the Android 1.6 check box.

Step 2 - Make sure your app will still run on phones running Cupcake(Android 1.5) 

Add the following to your manifest...

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3"  android:targetSdkVersion="4"/>

<supports-screens
     android:smallScreens="true"
     android:largeScreens="false"
     android:anyDensity="false">
      </supports-screens>

Setting largeScreens="false" tells the platform to manage the screen and in my experience apps display just fine.
If they don’t fit the screen white space is added but at least the ui is not distorted.  
Setting anyDensity="false" tells the platform to manage the UI itself.
When I had this set to true the UI was all shrunken up and looked like ASS on the big screens and on the small screen it was blown up and distorted and partially looked like ASS.

That’s it! All done!

That should get your apps working on all three screen sizes while still working on devices with 1.5 installed.   

I just attended the keynote at Max 09 and they anounced that flash player 10.1 for Google Android Powered Devices will be available the first have of 2010! It's Full Flash for mobile so none of that lite junk and Im assuming that us Flex Developers will be able to take full advantage. This will also be available for windows bricks and palm.

Attached is a picture I snaped of the Android Device they used to demonstrate flash on. It hasnt been release so that's why it's all taped up!

Sorry for the crappy picture. :)

I just released an update to one of my Android apps and when I was checking to see i it was listed as newly updated noticed that Pandora has finally been released.

I'm HAPPY!

My Android Phone(t-mobile G1) is pretty awesome. I have been using it for the past 2 months or so and now I can't live without it. It's basically everything My t-mobile wing was supposed to be and a whole lot more.

 I haven’t really done any posts about Android Development as I am usually to busy developing for Android and this is yet another post that is not about android development. Tonight I bought my wife a myTouch and was pretty impressed by the packaging(stay classy myTouch). Not that it matters because I'm sure it will end up on a shelf in the back of a closet but it's pretty damn nice and could easily double as a travel case for when your on the road and want to keep all your accessories together for some reason I guess. Ill post a couple pics when I get a chance. Not only is my wife happy but so is my son(who helps me out with my android projects when time permits) because he got her 3 month old G1! So now were a family of android users and as soon as the Sholes or the Samsung Galaxy get released ill have use my G1 or development only.

anyways...by the way did I mention that this would just be me rambling on?

Here's are favorite things about the phone!

1. Easy to use
2. relatively small yet not too small to hold in fact it feels great in my hand
3. Tons of GREAT APPS!
4. Tons of those GREAT Apps are free!
5. Automatic contact syncing(with your Gmail account)
6. All(well most) of the apps work great unlike my previous Windows Mobile Brick
7. taking pictures and video is easy as hell!(video is even easier if you use QIK, but ill get to that later)
8. Did I mention how easy it was to use:)

Here's what I usually have installed on my phone

1. FartDroid! - who doesnt like farts? okay...I may be a little biased on this one.
2. IP Cam Viewer Lite - A great app that lets you view your IP Cameras in the palm of your hand anywhere that you may be
3. QIK - stream live videos from your phone!
4. K-9 - The best email client I have used. it's the closest thing I have used on any mobile device to a full fledged desktop email client.
5. Obama Cam - Just who doesnt want to have their picture taken with the president?
6. Ringdroid - edit and save files to use as ringtones(or anything else) right in the palm of your hand, even at WalGreens while waiting for a prescription.
7. Layar - This is about the coolest thing I have ever seen. Lets you use Google, Wikipedia visually so to speak. Just check out their site as they explain what the heck it is a lot better than I do. All I know is it worked great on our road trip to Santa Barbara a couple of weeks ago. Used it to find restaurants, info about places we drove through, and even restrooms when the kids had to go:)
8. Google Maps - This is just AWESOME. Turn by turn directions, simple to use, fast as hell. Almost as good as a regular GPS unit but instead of it telling you where to turn your copilot does all the talking:)
9. Real Time Traffic - This little app visually gives you traffic conditions and is very easy to use while driving(not that I condone that kind of thing....but it sure does work great). This app alone saved me at least an hour on the way home.

I received my new hard drive today and immediately installed the RTM version of Windows 7 Ultimate on it, took about 20 minutes:). I have had the RC release running on 2 lesser machines for a few months now and have had absolutely no complaints.

  For the record there's nothing wrong with my current hard drive i just wanted a faster drive(7200rpm).

The next step was to get it ready for Android development which I have been doing for about 9 months now.  A couple of Android Developers that I know had some trouble debugging on Windows 7 and although they finally got it to work they didn't quite know how they did it so i figured id give MotoDev Studio a shot and see if it worked for me and it DID!

If your wondering what MotoDev Studio is ....it's basically an automatic, easier way of setting up eclipse for Android Development.  

Was it easier?

Heck yes!  All you have to do is download and install JRE6 and then download and install MotoDev Studio which is about 100MB. After installing it prompts you to download and install the android SDK, which it does for you and then your off and running.  Although my laptop doesn't meet the required specs it seems to run just as good as the regular install of eclipse with the android plugin runs on Windows XP pro. For the record I'm running a Dell Inspiron E1505 with a 1.6 CPU and 2 GB of ram.

Here's a screenshot of my first breakpoint running on Windows 7!

My wife and I carved pumpkins with the kids tonight.

T-Mobile started taking pre orders today on the first mobile phone to run Google’s Android OS.  If you haven’t checked it out you should. The device hasn’t even shipped yet and the lineup of available applications looks awesome.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these primarily because it’s not powered by Microsoft. I have had my share of windows mobile devices and I am ready to move on.

As far as I know there is no flash support at this time but this may be time for me to dive into Java.

I LOVE Flex! It’s awesome! The debugger works great and there the support is awesome! Well that’s how I felt until yesterday! How come I cant launch an executable from a desktop application written in AIR?  Why!?!?!?!?

I can do it with a flash projector and have been able to do so for years!

Merapi? Merapi is cool but  what if you don’t know Java? Yes I can learn Java but why should I have to use a third party application for such a simple task and what happened to Rapid Development?

I’m sure I can figure out a way to do this in .net however I don’t have time for this right now so it seems my only option is to write a flash projector to do my bidding.

I’m done ranting now .

A few months ago I was playing with Doug McCune's Coverflow component and made a simple photo carosel to display some photos. I was going through some of my projects yesterday and when I came across the Photo Carosel I thought it would be cool to use it as My Desktop Wallpaper. I have never used a swf for wallpaper before so I googled the topic and found this cool free(for personal use) swf wallpaper tool called Flash Wallpaper from Tenmiles. Im sure I could figure out how to do it myself but this was quick and painless and took less than 5 minutes to set up and install my first Flex Wallpaper.

Below is a screenshot of it on my laptop, I also installed it on my Asus eee and it works great on both machines.

 It's nothing too fancy but I like it and so do my kids!

Now i'm wondering if there is a better way to do this with Air. If anyone has done this or can point me to some online resources that I may have missed I would greatly Appreciate it