sdk – Terence Eden’s Blog

Share Android Apps on Twitter (or anywhere else)

Terence Eden — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:41:43 +0000

I attended the Mobile Monday meeting "200,000 Apps - Where's Mine" last night. One thing that became clear is that apps don't do a very good job of promoting themselves. One crippling problems with most app stores is that there's no (easy) way to share an app with a friend.

Here's some basic code for an Android app which will post the URL of your app to Twitter. Stick it in a button or menu item for easy sharing.

String twitterUri = "http://m.twitter.com/?status=";
String marketUri = Uri.encode("http://example.com/?q=app&title=test");
Intent shareOnTwitterIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(twitterUri + marketUri));
startActivity(shareOnTwitterIntent);

Some important things to note.

This is set to post to the mobile version of Twitter. Your user is on a phone - don't direct them to a site that won't work on their device.
The second string is URI encoded.
Consider if you want to post a "market://" link. I would advise against it. Twitter won't render it as a link and, even if it did, 90% of users won't be able to click on it. Make it a link that will direct desktop users to your website, mobile users to a mobile friendly site and Android users direct to the market.

Facebook also has an API for this sort of sharing.

http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=example.com&t=test

Again, it points to the mobile site and needs to be URL encoded.

Happy sharing!

Android Tutorial - Clickable Widgets

Terence Eden — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:09:42 +0000

Another quick Android tutorial. I couldn't find an easy or correct method of launching a browser when you click on a homescreen widget. Well, here it is...

public class clickWidget extends AppWidgetProvider
{
@Override
public void onUpdate( Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds )
{
RemoteViews remoteViews =
   new RemoteViews( context.getPackageName(), R.layout.widget );
remoteViews.setImageViewResource(R.id.ImageView01, drawableResourse);

ComponentName myWidget =
   new ComponentName( context, clickWidget.class );

// Create an Intent to launch Browser
Intent intent =
   new Intent(
      Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://example.com")
   );
PendingIntent pendingIntent =
   PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, intent, 0);

remoteViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.ImageView01, pendingIntent);
appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget( myWidget, remoteViews);
}

I've used this as the basis of a demo widget - "MI5 Terror Threat Level". The widget displays the UK's Threat Level on your homescreen. Clicking on it takes you to the MI5 page discussing the threat level.

The threat level is determined by parsing the RSS that the security services so helpfully provide. At the moment, the widget keeps a local copy of the graphics because the RSS feed contains references to "localhost" images.

You can download the widget by scanning in this QR code.

MI5 Widget - QR Code