Advancing Backwards

I just finished writing an overhaul for my own personal Android application repository, which I call AndroidLab. Previously, it was merely a point for me to upload an APK and for others to then download said APK. Not overly useful, aside from serving as a file server.

Ive upgraded the system to make it easier to track the development process of my applications. You can now download all previous versions of the application that have been uploaded, as well as a detailed changelog that gets updated each time a new version is uploaded to the server.

Hopefully this will make the application more useful, and Ive got more changes planned for some distant point in the future, including a feedback and rating system, as well as error logs and reporting.

You can check out the site at android.advback.com

One thing I’ve been grappling with recently is how to get home screen applications widgets to work for my application. There is a decent tutorial in the Android developer documents about the subject (located here), but it doesn’t really go into too much detail on how to make your widgets interactive. Sure, it shows you how to set up an OnClickListener on an element of your widget to load an activity from elsewhere, but what if you want the widget to do something more, like redraw itself with a new image when its clicked? This seems pretty simple, but to be honest, it took me a lot of fiddling to get it to happen.

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In my ongoing quest to write about little known or poorly documented features of Android, I stumbled across something this morning that I feel needs a little bit more exposure, as it frustrated me for quite a while trying to figure it out.

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