Android Dreams, Widgets and Notifications: Life Outside Your App
This course teaches you how to provide users with a rich and interactive experience without ever requiring them to open your app through the effective use of Android Dreams, widgets, and notifications.
What you'll learn
Sometimes the best app experiences occur completely outside of your app. Users must often switch back and forth between a variety of tasks, which they can do much more effectively if they can interact with each app’s information without having to explicitly open the app. This course teaches you how to provide this incredible out-of-app user experience using Android dreams, widgets, and notifications. Dreams allow your app to display information or provide entertainment while the device is docked or charging. Widgets allow your app to provide an interactive user experience directly on the Android home screen. With notifications your app can provide information to the user through the status bar even when the user is using a different app; notifications can also gather information from the user and, when necessary, allow the user to jump directly to the appropriate screen within your app right from the status bar.
Table of contents
- Introduction 2m
- Creating Compatable Notifications 4m
- Providing Notification Action 2m
- Managing Notification Display 3m
- Demo: Creating a Notification 7m
- Demo: Creating a Notification with an Action 4m
- Taking More Control 6m
- Demo: Creating Personallized Notifications 4m
- Demo: Stacking Notifications 8m
- Expandable Notfications 2m
- Demo: Big Text Notification 3m
- Demo: Big Picture Notification 3m
- Summary 2m
- Introduction 1m
- Updating Widgets 1m
- Widget Provider Update Period 2m
- Application Triggered Update 4m
- Demo: Application Triggered Update 7m
- AlarmManager Triggered Update 2m
- Demo: AlarmManager Triggered Update 11m
- Adding Widget Configuration 3m
- Demo: Adding Widget Configuration Part 1 13m
- Demo: Adding Widget Configuration Part 2 5m
- Summary 2m
About the author
Jim Wilson is president of JW Hedgehog, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in solutions for the Android, iOS, and Microsoft platforms. Jim has over 30 years of software engineering experience, with the past 15 years heavily focused on creating mobile device and location-based solutions. He has co-founded multiple software-related startups and has served in a consulting role at several more. After nearly a decade as a Microsoft Device Application Development MVP, Jim now focuses on developing A... more