Mark,
Thank you for taking the time to reply. There are a lot of
restrictions placed on developers trying to provide a quality user
interface. I can live with this particular restriction but I would
appreciate help on one other issue. If I use the navigation buttons to
highlight and select an item in my listview, and then press MENU, the first
menu item is highlighted, where if I hadn't previously navigated to one of
the items on my list view, and press MENU, the menu item would not be
highlighted.. I would like to prevent this from happening for the sake of
consistency.
I wonder why the programmer doesn't just simply have the
ability to highlight or de-highlight an item with one command. But then I
also wonder why the programmer cannot simply call or hide the virtual
keyboard with one command each. Getting rid of the virtual keyboard proved
to be a messy affair with unwanted side effects. Even now, when doing a text
entry, I find that if I hold down some characters, such as e, g, and r,
unwanted options appear on the screen. I would really appreciate help on
getting rid of that. I have purchsed two books including yours, enrolled in
a University course ( to withdraw after 3 weeks when I realised their lack
of their ability to help), and yet I find most knowledge comes from trial
and error, constantly reinventing the wheel, and the occasional tip from the
forums, if your lucky. I would love to know where I can find systematic
introductions and explanations for these basic Android features. The Android
documentation seems to be written as a reference source for people who
already understand it. Seeing links being given to the Android documentation
as an 'answer' to forum questions, is frustrating and annoying. People are
asking for help and examples. The existence of, and size of the forums, is
testament to the Android documentation not giving us developers what we
need. Much of my programming time and efforts seems to be in developing ad
hoc workarounds, to situations that prevent me from achieving the standard
of user interface that I require.
Two features that led me to invest most of last year into
learning Android, were 1) the fact that it was claimed that you didn't even
need a handset. If it worked on the emulator you could rely that it would
work on the phone, and 2) the App store. Both of these advantages are
seriously eroded by the fragmentation of Android. And it doesn't help to
read of Android engineers expressing their anger in forum replies to
reference being made to the fragmentation issues.
All of the above strengthens the case for me to not merely "
rethink your user interface to avoid the question " as advised by you, but
to rethink the ultimate question of does Android offer enough to developers
to be worthwhile.
I hope that you are able to take these criticisms as being offered
constuctively.
Michael McLean
Also when entering text into a EditText
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Murphy" <mmur...@commonsware.com>
To: <android-developers@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 12:11 AM
Subject: Re: [android-developers] How to select an item in a listview by
code
Michael J McLean wrote:
Thank you for that, but how can I show that the item has been selected?
You rethink your user interface to avoid the question. Do not use
ListView with a "selection" mindset. Think of ListView as being more
akin to a rolling roster of buttons, not something that has a persistent
"selection".
--
Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
http://commonsware.com | http://twitter.com/commonsguy
Android Training in US: 22-26 February 2010: http://onlc.com
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