Posts Tagged ‘View’
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: Transparent or Translucent View Background
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This Android post is going to explain how to change the background color of a View, to make it completely or partially transparent. It may seen a little strange at first, but sometimes it makes sense to create a translucent or transparent background, like when coding an application with multiple viewports, such as a graphic editing tool, for example. Luckily, Android has already some built-in features that aids the programmer in achieving total or partial transparency at any required level.
So, to create a fully transparent background, all that’s needed is to add the following line to the Manifest file: (more…)
Android: Changing the animation between Activities
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This post features how to change Android’s default animation when switching between Activities. Before reading the rest, please know that the code that changes the standard animation be found at the API Demo that comes with the Android SDK. But since there’s a lack of proper documentation regarding this subject and it’s difficult to find a place explaining it, here is a post that helps in aiding these two problems.
So, the code to change the animation between two Activities is very simple: just call the overridePendingTransition() from the current Activity, after starting a new Intent. This method is available from Android version 2.0 (API level 5), and it takes two parameters, that are used to define the enter and exit animations of your current Activity. Here’s an example: (more…)
Android: Loading and playing videos from different sources
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
This is the 41st post on the website! It explains how to load images from a variety of locations, such as the ‘Resources’ folder, the SD card and from a remote server. As usual, the source code is available for download at the end of the post.
Let’s start with the basics: video formats. At the time this is being written, Android supports .3gp and .mp4 video files encoded as H.263,H.264 and MPEG-4 SP file formats. For an updated list, visit this link.
Android: Creating a button to load images from a remote server
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This is a follow up to the post published two days ago that explained how to load images into a View’s Canvas from different sources. Differently from the last post, I will explain how to load images from a remote server after the View has been loaded and rendered on the screen. Also, this post features how to download an image after pressing a button.
So, let’s get to it. The first thing the reader might be thinking is that we just need to create a button and place the code that downloads the image inside it. It’s not as simple as that, due to these problems: (more…)