I have a simple glass application Live Card which displays fine when debugging on Google Glass, however if I add a TableLayout (with or without rows) and debug on glass, I get the sad cloud. The card uses no dependent resources like network connectivity.
As documented here, TableLayout is not one of the types of views/widgets that are supported by RemoteViews. (This is a restriction in the Android framework and not Glass-specific.) Whenever RemoteViews fail to inflate properly, it is manifested as this "sad cloud" image.
You may want to consider redesigning your layout to use nested LinearLayouts instead in order to get around this restriction.
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I've been playing with the glass GDK and glass 'native' (Java) development in general. I've got a open GL app that works well enough on Glass (using standard android conventions) and I'm looking to port it to the GDK to take advantage of voice triggers and what not.
While I can certainly use it easily enough as an Immersion (I think anyway) what I'd like to do is use it as a Live Card. I'm just not sure how possible or practical this is. The documentation seems to imply that with a high frequency rendering card this should be possible but before I dive in I was hoping someone with more experience could weigh in.
(Forgive me if this is obvious -- I'm new to Android having spent the last few years in IOS/obj-c land)
XE16 supports OpenGL in live cards. Use the class GlRenderer: https://developers.google.com/glass/develop/gdk/reference/com/google/android/glass/timeline/GlRenderer
I would look at your app and determine if you want to have more user input or not and whether you want it to live in a specific part of your Timeline or just have it be launched when the user wants it.
Specifically, since Live Cards live in the Timeline, they will not be able to capture the swipe backward or swipe forwards gestures since those navigate the Timeline. See the "When to use Live Cards" section of: https://developers.google.com/glass/develop/gdk/ui/index
If you use an Immersion, however you will be able to use those swipe backwards and forwards gestures as well as these others: https://developers.google.com/glass/develop/gdk/input/touch This will give you complete control over the UI and touchpad, with the exception that swipe down should exit your Immersion.
The downside is that once the user exits your Immersion, they will need to start it again likely with a Voice Trigger, whereas a Live Card can live on in part of your Timeline.
You should be able to do your rendering in both a Surface, which a LiveCard can use or in whatever View you choose to put in your Activity which is what an Immersion is. GLSurfaceView for example may be what you need and that internally uses a Surface: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/opengl.html Note that you'll want to avoid RemoteViews but I think you already figured that out.
As seen by the GDK sample code, there is a set of Android Widget classes (TextView, etc) that are supported on Google Glass. Has anyone compiled a list? I would love to know what options I am working with prior to the official GDK.
According to what I have gathered, you should be able to use any UI element within your application using GDK (it's simply an Android activity displayed in Glass). There are some services that aren't available though, that is really the only limitation at the moment. Some limitations I've spotted are: SpeechRecognizer not available - use RecognizerIntent instead, GPS might have some issues/limitations.
Since Glass is built on Android, all of the standard Android widgets are available. You should, however, restrict yourself to widgets that provide a high-quality user experience on Glass. For example, buttons and checkboxes aren't very usable since the user can't click on them directly.
I am working with Google Maps on Android 4.0 and I would like to know:
Is there a testing framework (or anything..) that can interact with the Google Maps API? What are the possibilities when interacting/testing with Google Maps on Android? Is it not possible to find all pins on the map and perform a click on them or perhaps determine zoom level?
There seem to be a couple questions on this website dealing with similar issues/questions with no answer.
I realize "interact with" is a broad term. I am really looking for any kind of help whether it is a suggestion or just to tell me something is not possible.
I have been using JUnit but it seems limited by itself. Just today I started looking at Robotium since the majority of tests I need to do are UI based. I am new to Robotium so maybe it is possible with this and I have not discovered it yet?
When our team created an Android application that used Google maps, I was able to create tests using the R.id for the map fragment. It is important to note that I had access to the Application's code, so I knew what variables to look for.
Prior to creating this test, I wanted to make sure that I was targeting the correct R.id, so I went into the R file, copied the value and placed it in
assertEquals(id.satellite,copiedRValue);
which returned true, and then build the test around the changeable variable
initialID = solo.waitForFragmentById(id.satellite); //where id.satellite is defined in the R file, eventually would time out and throw error if fragment was not present
//save the map type, leave
//and do other awsome stuff
//before coming back to the map
finalID = solo.waitForFragmentById(id.satellite);//capture the map fragment that is now displayed, again would time out if this specific fragment was not visible
//assert that the fragments are equal
assertTrue(initialID.equals(finalID);
The biggest problem that I had with this test and with other Robotium tests is that I had click events happening to bring in menus and sometimes Robotium would not perform the click, and the test would fail on the click.
This was my first go at testing with Robotium, so there might be other ways to manipulate the R.id values to create a tighter test.
In case anyone wants to know after much searching I finally found something that can test Google Maps. Things such as zoom level and I believe tap pin (method is called tapMapMarkerItem()) are supported. I have not tested the pin tap yet tho.
Apparently the awesome Robotium does not support map testing by itself. Nicholas Albion was nice enough to create an extension to provides testing support for maps on Android. Thank you so much Nicholas!
So here it is:
1. Download the Robotium jars from robotium.org (I found this helpful http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidTesting/article.html - by Lars Vogel)
2. Download the extension from https://github.com/nalbion/robotium-maps
I have recently implemented some data visualisation using d3.js, I'm now trying to get this to work for Internet Explorer browser versions 7 and above. The common suggestion to get this to work, is to combine d3.js with raphael.js, which is a cross browser graphics library.
There already seem to be some implementations of such libraries such as
r2d3.js :
d34raphael.js :
I'm trying to understand if these existing implementation already have d3's capability of data binding and the physics implementation of the force layout to implement something as simple as this d3 example : http://bl.ocks.org/1095795
I have been looking into this too and a number of options came up.
Chrome Frame - A browser plug-in that actually uses chrome underneath, meaning SVG just works. This is great if you're able to deploy plugins to the browser, for a real commercial environment however this may not be possible.
SVG Web - The aim is it bring SVG to all browsers. It looks like a fairly large project, one that's had Google's input. This doesn't however work out of the box with D3 though I don't know much about the issues.
D34Raphael - You've mentioned this one, I found again it doesn't work out of the box. Check the project out on GitHub, there hasn't been any commit activity in months and there's some pull requests "first pass on trying to get support for .on() required for event binding". If it doesn't support events, is that an issue to you? I'd generally keep away from this one.
R2D3 - Again another one you mentioned. I took the Sankey example from the D3 website and had to make a few changes to get it working. The main things I couldn't get working (Drag Events, Groups - though can use an alternative). It took about a day of effort to get the example working in IE8 and I believe is in a useable state. The project on GitHub is also much more active, the developer is committing, pulling work in and is very active on discussions etc. This gets my vote.
I want to display a map in a MFC application (Visual Studo 2008 with MFC Feature Pack).
Off the top of my head I have the following requirements:
I have to be able to add my own markers (plain lat/lon positions), preferrably with different colors/icons so one can distinguish between different types of markers.
If the map data is fetched from an online source, it has to be cache-able, i.e. I can pre-load maps for an area at a certain (or several) zoom-level(s) and then switch to "offline mode". Alternatively all map data is installed together with the application.
The standard operations like zoom in/out and pan should be possible for the user.
The user has to be able to select my markers, preferably by dragging a rectangle around them.
Since the whole app is written in C++/MFC I don't want to have to use the .NET runtime for this plugin.
It shouldn't cost a fortune.
I am currently using an ActiveX plugin called "ESRI MapObjects LT2" which can do all that in some way but it's very tedious to implement, the development seems to have stopped around the time when Visual Studio 6 was available and map material is either very basic or very expensive.
I thought about using Google Maps or Google Earth but I think they don't really support being used by non-web based applications.
I found ArcView to be some sort of successor of the plugin I use currently but I don't think I belong to the target audience since the functionality it offers is way more than what I need. Also I didn't find any information on pricing.
I have written an open-source Geocaching app ( it's in c++ ) that renders maps, the source is at:
http://code.google.com/p/gpsturbo/
It uses my own custom rendering but you could rip out the map parsing if you want. It renders map using google tiles ( and caches the tiles for offline use), as well as Garmin format GPS maps, there is also an Openstreetmap format renderer as well.
Reconsider google if you have internet access. You can make an instance of the IE browser appear in a frame within your application. I believe you can use an ActiveX control. Also Google Earth has a way to embed itself into a web page, and possibly an application as well.
Another option is Global Mapper which is not anywhere near as nice as Google Maps or Google Earth.
We used ESRI for a long time before abandoning it due to a lack of performance and lack of support. It was such a big pain to pay $10k for a license, and then be told they need $2k more so that we can actually use the thing. Oh, and then $2k more to add some extra functionality. Even when it didn't work, their support was dismal to lack-luster.
If you are not bound to Google Maps, you could choose OpenStreetMap.
There are couple of known applications for rendering OSM maps:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cobra
Kosmos
osmclient (on SourceForge)
First two render map directly, last one uses OpenStreetMap.org tiles.
You can cache as many tiles or data as you want, you are not restricted to do so.