Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Don’t you think Bluetooth plays a significant role in making the smart phones smart? So let’s talk about something smarter i.e. Bluetooth Smart or BLE. As far as the BLE or the Bluetooth low energy is concerned it is not just a feature it’s a new technology

it was first proposed by NOKIA in 2006 with the name WIBREE. And now the devices which are equipped with BLE are called as Bluetooth Smart devices and the devices which has both Bluetooth classic and the BLE are called as Bluetooth Smart Ready devices.

jQuery with WinJS in Windows Store Application

Introduction
As we all know, we can design Windows store applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We can use jQuery along with the WinJS as well.

Description
Let’s open up the Visual Studio and create a new navigation project under JavaScript with a name called jqTest.
Now we will get the project created and opened with the default.html page.

 

Let’s get download the jQuery and place that in js folder in Solution Explorer.

SeekBar Customization for Android Development

If you want some customization in the seekbar which you use while developing android apps, there are several ways of doing this. You can customize seek bar with the help of the xml or you can make it impressive even programmatically.

Let’s have a look if you want to change its appearance with the help of xml

First of all the progress Drawable attribute of the seekbar should be set as the xml file in the drawables folder as

android:progressDrawable=”@drawable/progress_seekbar”

The overall seek bar implementation in the layout xml should look something like this

Behavior of WinJS.Promise.Join during Exceptions

Introduction

Promise is an object, which promises the user to get back the values or do some task after performing the promised activity without hampering the main UI. The execution of the other activities will work as normal. So in single word we can say, it is asynchronous.

The JOIN method of the Promise works like a waiter in the restaurant, waiting for the whole order from a table from each person. We can club separate promise objects and join them together. Join ensures to perform a task after all the promise objects finished their execution.

Queries encountered on the above

On all the above, I encountered the query,

• what will happen when any of the Promise gets an error ?
• Will it able to club the output and wait for the promises ? OR it will quite the execution ? Etc. etc.

After some of the homework and trials below are my findings.

Toast MyToast

In this post we will be talking about the most helpful feature provided by Android for a quick notification to user, i.e. Toasts “Small informative texts shown at bottom-center of device screen, for defined time duration”.

Default UI design of these toasts is a semi-transparent dark color background with white text over it, not even showing the name of application which spawned it, no so eye-catching, right? I know… So, let’s make a custom Toast Notification that complements our awesome UI…

Backup API Implementation: Creating Backup of App Data and Settings Over Cloud

How about creating a backup setting for an android application, so that when the application is uninstalled the personal settings it does not get erased permanently, instead the settings is stored on the cloud and the next time when you install the application it asks you to restore the settings. Interestingly, it can restore the settings when you install the application into other device too. It can be achieved through Backup API provided by Google. You will find it really interesting, easy and useful.

It’s not for the synchronizing of the data with other apps or storing the data which could further be used as in the case of SQLite . Also there is no method to access the backed up data other than the API and neither any way to make the Backup status known. This makes it easier to implement and lesser code it requires.

Android currently supports and provides helpers to backup and restore the complete data of the Shared Preferences or the internal storage if they are light weighted i.e. less than one megabyte.

For the implementation of Backup API the first and the foremost thing which has to be done is create the API key for your application by clicking on the link

https://developer.android.com/google/backup/signup.html?csw=1
and registering your application by giving the appropriate package (the package name of your app)

Android Backup

Device Administration API in Android

Device Admin API is basically used for the access of the device at the administrative level. Like accessing the device password, disabling the device camera, limiting the size of the password, setting the maximum failed attempt for the password, erasing all the data of the device etc.

 

It basically is implemented with the use of three classes named as below,

 

DeviceAdminReceiver

DevicePolicyManager

DeviceAdminInfo

 

The first and the foremost thing you need to do is create the MyDeviceAdminReciever.java class obviously after creating a new project and the MyDeviceAdminReceiver class should extend the DeviceAdminReciever class. The DeviceAdminReceiver class is the base class for implementing the DeviceAdminApi and in the app must contain its subclass.