Posts Tagged ‘res’
Android: get String resource at another XML namespace
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This post shows the necessary steps to obtain the correct String resource outside the Android XML namespace. It has been written specifically for dealing with string resources associated with Preferences inflated from XML files, so this post assumes that the reader is familiar with writing customized preferences for Android. Altought, it can probably be used on other situations. This code has been tested on an emulator running Android 2.1 and also on real devices running Android 2.1, 2.2 and 4.0.4.
Android: Bitmap to Integer array
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
As stated in the title, this post explains how to generate an Integer pixel array from a Bitmap object, that will hold the color information from each pixel of the image. This post also explains the opposite: creating a Bitmap object from an Integer array. This can be useful when one needs to apply effects to Bitmap instances. As usual, an example Eclipse project is available for download at the end of this post. It works both on the emulator and on physical devices running Android 2.0.
So, let’s get to the code. Putting it in a simplified manner, the below Activity decodes a PNG image into a Bitmap object, then, an array is created with the same number of pixels as the image. After that, a method from the Bitmap instance puts the pixel color information in the array. (more…)
Android: Disabling anti-aliasing for pixel art
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
Android is great when it comes to displaying scaled pictures in applications and games since it tries to interpolate the pixels, making the resulting image look as good as possible. That works for almost every case, however, what about pixel art? This behavior isn’t good for that because, after scaling it, the resulting image will be “smoothed out”, invalidating the handcrafted pixel placement.
There are two options in this case: use an image with the correct size and never scale it, or try to disable anything that could be aliasing the image. This post is going to describe how to do the latter. As usual, an example project is available for download at the end of the post. (more…)
Android: reading float values from a XML file
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
When programming an Android app, data such as integers, drawables and strings can be loaded from XML files through the Resources class, using their automatically generated IDs. But a float can’t be placed in these XML files, since the Resources class won’t generate IDs for it. This post will focus on explaining how to load a float, and some other values from a customized XML file. All code featured in this tutorial is available at the end of the post.
It’s worth mentioning that this example uses the XmlResourceParser class (a XML pull parser) to read the contents from a XML file. This is just one of the three available methods of retrieving the contents of a XML file in Android. That being said, the first thing we are going to need is the XML file. (more…)
Android: Loading files from the Assets and Raw folders
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This tutorial will explain how to load files from the res/raw and the Assets folder using a String to specify the file name. Yes, there are a lot of tutorials on this subject, but they all use the automatically generated integer IDs from the R class as inputs and not many of them even mention the possibility of loading files from the Assets folder. As a result of depending on the ID, the file reference must be known beforehand.
Instead, the code featured in this post will explain how to find the reference to the file and then load it at runtime based solely on its name. This means that the reference ID and the file don’t even have to exist in the first place, and can be acquired at run time.