A hack to catch soft keyboard show/hide event on Android

Today at work, I got this problem: catching event when soft keyboard comes up/down (or show/hide) ?!

At first, I thought it would be easy to resolve, but after a while of googling, I realized that there is no official event or listener in Android API for that, but I did find some workarounds like:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4312319/howto-capture-the-virtual-keyboard-show-hide-event-in-android
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3793093/android-edittext-soft-keyboard-show-hide-event

Well, there are some workarounds that were already posted but they are incomplete (some work on 4.0.4 but not 2.3, some don't work all the time), but at least they are still useful, they gave me an idea to make this "complete" workaround (well, at least it works like a charm in my case for now, I tested on both Android 2.3 and 4.0.4), so I would like to share it here, hope it helps someone out there ;)

Usage: just use following LinearLayout overridden class as the main layout(and of course, use "match_parent" for its layout_width and layout_height) of the activity where you want to catch soft keyboard show/hide events, then setOnSoftKeyboardVisibilityChangeListener for your main layout. Finally, you need this line in your <activity> tag (in manifest.xml) where SoftKeyboardHandledLinearLayout is used:

android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize"

Take a look at following code to get a better idea of how to implement this hack.

WRAP_CONTENT doesn't work with ViewPager?!

Lately, I have been working on an Android project, and when I was making a tutorial activity for it, I got into a problem with ViewPager.

I wanted to use ViewPager and ViewPagerIndicator to show content of the tutorial activity, the ViewPager had a rounded corner background, and each page of it contains an ImageView which is a part of the tutorial. And the problem is although I set layout_width for the ViewPager as wrap_content but it always acts like match_parent?!

After googling for a while, I saw some guys got into the same problem, for example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8394681/android-i-am-unable-to-have-viewpager-wrap-content. They proposed some solutions but none of them matches my need, but this anwser gave me an idea.

Because the rounded corner background and all image on pages of the ViewPager have the same size, and as the answer says, it's possible to set a fixed size for the ViewPager, so the solution for my case is just set size of the ViewPager as size of the rounded corner background.

Check out following gist to get a clearer idea about it.

Create a flexible link to open Google Play or your own App from web browser in Android

Today I learnt a completely new thing as the title says it all, so I want to note it here for later uses.
So how to do?

In manifest.xml:

        <activity 
            android:label="@string/activity_label"
            android:name="com.your.package.ActivityName">
            <intent-filter>
                 <data
                      android:host="your-domain-or-whatever.com"
                      android:scheme="your-own-scheme" />
                 <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
                 <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
                 <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity> 

And your link should look like:

<a href="intent://your-domain-or-whatever.com/?param1=value1&amp;param2=value2#Intent;scheme=your-own-scheme;package=com.your.app.package;end">OPEN APP OR GOOGLE PLAY</a>

The last thing is catching parameters in your com.your.package.ActivityName. In onCreate of the Activity:

 @Override
 protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
  super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
  setContentView(R.layout.your_activity_layout);
  Uri mUri = getIntent().getData();
  String value1 = mUri.getQueryParameter("param1");
  String value2 = mUri.getQueryParameter("param2");
 }

That's all, bye xD!
P/S: Oh yeah, I just found this one too: https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/intents, check it out!

Fancier Vim

Wow, it's been a while I haven't blogged anything, I know!

I have just been busy with learning Japanese, it's a hard language to learn, but it's even harder when I need to learn it under pressure...
Well, that does suck, but at least I'm still alive :)

Lately, I tried to get used to Vim and I think I fell in love with it. And today, I spent my whole precious Saturday to get to know it more, and this is a result:

Basically, above result is just combination of:

• Vim 7.3 on Ubuntu 13.04
• Eclim 2.2.7 (Vim plugin)
• Powerline (Vim plugin) (Instruction for Ubuntu)

It's not really cool yet, but it's late now, I need to sleep and continue learning Japanese tomorrow :(

Not really cool yet, but it's late now, I need to sleep :D
さようなら!

My Vim configuration

Recently, I got used to Vim, and it's really cooooooooool and it looks way so professional :D
I think I will keep it as my favorite text editors ;)

Anyway, I would like to save and share my Vim configuration here and it will be updated as  soon as I found something new ;)


Copy following configuration into your ~/.vimrc or ~/.exrc (well, I'm really not sure which one will be loaded by Vim :D)

"[Basic]
syntax on                               "turn syntax on
set number                              "show line number
set autoindent                          "turn auto indent on
set tabstop=4                           "set tab = 4 spaces
set shiftwidth=4                        "set tab when use > or < = 4 spaces
set colorcolumn=81                      "show margin line
set cursorline                          "hightlight current line

"[OmniCompletion]
autocmd FileType python set omnifunc=pythoncomplete#Complete
autocmd FileType javascript set omnifunc=javascriptcomplete#CompleteJS
autocmd FileType html set omnifunc=htmlcomplete#CompleteTags
autocmd FileType css set omnifunc=csscomplete#CompleteCSS
autocmd FileType xml set omnifunc=xmlcomplete#CompleteTags
autocmd FileType php set omnifunc=phpcomplete#CompletePHP
autocmd FileType c set omnifunc=ccomplete#Complete
autocmd FileType perl set omnifunc=perlcomplete#Complete
"change ^x^o to ^space
inoremap   pumvisible() \|\| &omnifunc == '' ?
\ "\C-n>" :
\ "\C-x>\C-o>=pumvisible() ?" .
\ "\"\\c-n>\\c-p>\\c-n>\" :" .
\ "\" \\bs>\\C-n>\"\"
imap  

Some useful GIT commands

View unpushed commits

git log --branches --not --remotes

Make git command line colorful

git config --global --add color.ui true 

Create simple infinite carousel in Android with ViewPager

At first I thought it's easy, someone must have implemented it already, but after searching for it on Google, I got no luck, nobody has done and shared it on the Net, so I decided to make it myself.

I read some posts like:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11647021/how-to-create-create-a-carousel-pattern

• http://www.androidpatterns.com/uap_pattern/carousel

So I implemented it as you can see in below video:

 

The main idea is:

• Use ViewPager as the main view with pages are Fragment, then use ViewPager.setPageMargin(int) to set margin as a negative number, so the next and previous pages of the selected page will be showed up.
• Override the layout which is the root view of Fragments to create scale animation.
• Make a little hack in FragmentPagerAdapter so we can fling infinitely to both directions of the ViewPager.

For more information, you guys can get the source code here: https://github.com/mrleolink/SimpleInfiniteCarousel. I tried to comment as much as possible in source code, so I hope you understand my idea.

By the way, I don't think it's the best solution to implement the carousel pattern, so if you have any idea or there's something you don't understand about what I code, just drop me a line :)