Apps For Android

An open source collection of sample Android Applications has been launched by Google under the alias Apps for Android. The first application available is called WikiNotes and is described as, “a wiki note pad that uses intents to navigate to wiki words and other rich content stored in the notes.”

This sample app has a view and edit mode – in view mode links are active and take you directly to other “note” pages and to the dialer or other functions if so called. Edit modes provides a plain text version of the wiki so you can quickly make changes and change back to view mode.

However functional or practical WikiNotes may or may not be, the application was really written to demonstrate some of Android’s core concepts. Developers just getting started with Android may want to fire up the Android emulator and see what makes the app tick to get a better idea of how to implement code in their own apps.

Some of what it hopes to illustrate (from the readme):

- Activities with IntentFilters for viewing, editing and searching
  specific MIME data types, in this case a MIME type defined for a
  wikinote or a list of wikinotes
- The activities themselves which demonstrate lifecycle, state management,
  forward navigation through intent resolution
- Use of the Linkify class to turn ordinary textual information into
  live links that fire default intents
- Use of default intents on different data types to achieve different
  results, for example, navigating to a new wiki note, or calling a
  phone number, or browsing to a URL, etc.
- A custom ContentProvider that looks up wiki notes using a note name,
  this demonstrates the pattern matching of ReST-like URIs to find
  the data and pass parameters like the note name to find as part of
  the URI.
- Within the ContentProvider implementation, SQLite usage for storage,
  retrieval, update, deletion and searching of data
- UI layout and creation for multiple activities, including menus

Google mentions to check back soon as more of these “sample applications” are made available. Don’t expect anything too flashy… chances are all the good stuff is being kept “under wraps” by developers aiming to win the Developer Challenge.

Nonetheless, this is a nice develop-ment for develop-ers.