Here’s a very easy and fast way of parsing JSON I’ve been using the past few months: Jackson. It’s not Android-based, so you can use it on server or desktop applications as well, but I found it very useful on mobile because of the large amounts of data that resides in the cloud lately. Enough [...]
We all know how ugly most of the applications on the Market are. Black screens, gray buttons, white texts, all native stuff which looks good but only in the right combination. Many developers realize that, and try to do their own buttons, which still don’t look too professional, because they simply don’t fit in. And [...]
I learned one important thing today: When you do layout from code and you use drawables (nine-patches or xml-defined drawables), always using setPadding only after setBackground. I know, this might be a childish thing that Android developers already know about, but it made me bang my head around the walls for 15 minutes today Explanation: [...]
As opposed to Apple’s AppStore, 65% of the apps on the Android Market are free. So, where’s the trick ? Well, most of them show ads, you (the user) view those ads and when something interesting is shown you even click them. And that’s when the developer makes money. Sometimes $0.01 per click, sometimes $3.5 per click (at least that’s my record). Usually, those ads come from Google’s AdMob, Millennial Media or ZestAdz (there are more, but these are the largest three).
With the multitude of screen sizes and densities of Android devices out there, it has become increasingly hard to make Android apps look good on all devices, especially in games. And this is where the manifest <supports-screens/> attribute comes in. This manifest tag supports 4 attributes, each addressing a specific configuration: android:smallScreens, android:normalScreens, android:largeScreens and [...]