So, its been quite some time since I’ve posted anything here, so its time to break the silence. And, what better way to do so than by posting a small snippet of Android code that tripped me up? Todays topic: Accessing and setting Android system services outside of an activity. This is a small thing that many may already know, but in my tradition of documenting small things that trip me up, Im going to write about it anyways.
Recently, I was asked for my opinion of what the best available Android devices currently offered on Verizon were. Verizon offers somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-16 different Android devices (last I checked), and finding a good one can be somewhat of a struggle if you don’t know specifically what you’re looking for, what Android is capable of, or what you want out of Android and your new smartphone.
So, after a rather long absence from Android, I decided to dive back in and start tweaking an app I started a while back. This particular app uses the GPS to store a location in a database. The problem was, the app would sometimes try and store the location before the GPS was even ready, resulting in coordinates of 0, 0. At the same time, I also wanted the GPS reading to be as accurate as possible before it was stored in the database. Accuracy of +/- 80 feet is not so useful in the long run.
After some thought on how best to accomplish this without pissing off the user (nobody likes an application that seems to hang, even if there is something ticking in the background), I settled on displaying a ProgressDialog to let the user that something is indeed happening, and they can continue once its done.
