Posts Tagged ‘XML’
Android: how to create a loading screen – Part 3
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Featured, Programming
This is the third and final post of a series that explains how to code a loading screen for Android. The other two previous posts (which can be found here and here), used two distinct approaches to solve the problem of executing code on a background thread and update the progress back to the application’s UI thread. However, both of them relied on an instance of the ProgressDialog class to display the current progress. In the following paragraphs, instead of using this type of dialog, a custom View inflated from a layout XML file is going to be created to achieve that purpose.
As the other two previous posts, all the code in this article has been created and tested in Android 2.1. An example Eclipse project is available at the end of the post.
Android: Initialize View child class object from a XML file
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This tutorial shows how to inherit from the View class to create your own customized View element, and how to initialize an object from this child class with parameters defined at a layout XML file. There are two major advantages in this approach over initializing the extended View object at the Activity.
The first is that the Java part of your code remains clean, without a lot of member variable assignments to set the View’s basic parameters. The second and most important, is the possibility to instantly preview the changes at the Graphical Layout tool in Eclipse without the need to execute the application. This means that the space this customized View element takes on the screen can be immediately be seen and adjusted, if necessary.
Unity: Creating a texture from a XML file
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This Unity3D programming tutorial explains how to read a XML file from the Resources folder and use the pixel color data defined there to create a Texture2D object. Basically, it’s the same as creating a texture from an array, but this array will be obtained from a XML file, instead of being defined in the script.
Since even a small image uses a large amount of tags on the XML file, an example project is available for download at the end of the post. This sample project has a XML file with 4096 items, that creates a 64×64 texture.
Android: Fixing the API 12 Demos project errors
Posted by Dimitri | Filed under Programming
This post shows how to fix some of the most common errors when creating a project with the API 12 (Android 3.1) demos in the Eclipse IDE. The API samples comes bundled with the Android SDK and are a set of Activities that exemplifies how to do almost anything in Android. Following the instructions described at the official documentation to create a new Eclipse project with the API demos 12 code will cause a lot of errors.
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…)