Monthly Archives: August 2011

AIR for Android Application – 100 Days of Exercise

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100 Days of Exercise

100 Days of Exercise

Part of the evangelism team has been spending the past few weeks diving in and creating AIR mobile applications. We didn’t want them to look like just any other app so we hired the folks at The1stMovement and had them come up with some very cool designs across a few different application ideas. They gave us the PSD files and then we went to work developing them. It has been a great experience and I think it touches on something that AIR and Flex do really well; expressive, beautiful applications. This is an area where HTML/JS can’t quite cut it and that is pretty tough to do with native toolkits on iOS or Android. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that Flex and Flash excel at. Plus with AIR these apps can be taken and deployed to other platforms (you’ll see a version of all of these on the Apple App Store before too long). The apps themselves are awesome. Terry Ryan built a helpful item-finder called Finicky which incorporates a very cool grunge design. Renaun Erickson built the best looking Caltrain app on the market for finding train schedules and the closest stop to you based on GPS. Both are really spectacular.

Profile Screen

Profile Creation Screen

My contribution is 100 Days of Exercise, an app that will help track exercise progress over 100 days. Evidence has shown that if you do something 100 days in a row, it becomes a habit, and this app helps track that. It’s also supposed to help redefine what exercise means. For a lot of people, they think it means 3 hours at the gym, or an hour run, but it doesn’t have to. Just commit to something small for as long as you feel like you can do it. The goal is to get to the end of 100 days, not to throw yourself into a completely new lifestyle.

Wheel of Death

The Date Selector

One of the things I’m most proud of is the date picker. This is going to be an application for both Android and iOS and those platforms do date pickers very differently. Android has the buttons for up and down and iOS has the scroller. I wanted something that was very high design that would translate across both platforms. They came up with the “wheel of death” as a way to represent the month and date. So I took some of Evtim’s wheel layout code and created a custom Flex list layout that did what I wanted. It looks nice, is unique, performs well, and translates across any platform.

It’s been a fun project and I’m looking forward to adding a few things down the road. If you have any feedback, definitely drop me an email and let me know.

Dismissing a Flex Mobile PopUp With the Back Button

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In an application I’m building for Android I use a lot of pop up windows (because that’s how Android does combo boxes) and I was having a tough time figuring out how to get them to close when the user pushes the back button. By default, the framework will call navigator.popView() whenever the back button gets pushed and the only way to override that is by doing it at the application level, which isn’t really ideal.

So here’s what I came up with.

Basically I intercept the removing event on the view, which is the last event that gets called before the view goes away. Using that event I check to see if any of my PopUps are on the screen using the isPopUp property and if they are, I use event.preventDefault() to stop the view from being removed and instead just remove the PopUp.

protected function view1_removingHandler(event:ViewNavigatorEvent):void
{
     if(exerciseList.isPopUp)
     {
          PopUpManager.removePopUp(exerciseList);
          event.preventDefault();
     }
 
     if(timeList.isPopUp)
     {
          PopUpManager.removePopUp(timeList);
          event.preventDefault();
     }
}

I’m not sure if this is really the best way to solve this issue, so if anyone has something that they’ve done I’d love to hear about it in the comments.