android / AIDL - Kaleidescope

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Get the source for this example here

If you’d like to try it out on your device:

1. Download and install AIDL-Kaleidoscope-Remote.apk
2. Download and install AIDL-Kaleidoscope-Local.apk

I wanted to play around with AIDL - Android Interface Definition Language to test out how it can be used to communicate between two (or more I guess) Android processes at run time.

I found that there is more than one way to do Inter Process Communication (IPC) on Android, but I wanted to focus on the scenario of two completely different APKs talking to each other, via a contract defined using AIDL.

android / Configuration Launching

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Get the source for this example here

Often when building Android apps we need to find a way to apply different configuration settings depending on the type of build. For example, a development build might need to point to a development server, or a production build might need to prevent any configuration at all.

There are myriad of ways to achieve this, but I thought I’d build on an earlier post regarding deep linking to demonstrate how to have a companion configuration app or web page which is capable of launching the main application with a given state.

Our companion launcher app will be known as Configula because it will have the ability to infect our debug application behaviour - you know - just like vampires can, however we’ll also walk through how to put a silver cross on our release builds to repel Configula…

android / Launching apps from HTML links

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Get the source for this example here

A number of blog posts in this site include sample code that I am writing into an Android app as kind of a kitchen sink sandbox app to demonstrate how the code runs.

I hadn’t tried using deep links before and I thought it would be really cool if I could have HTML links in my blog content that could open my Android apps directly to code samples related to my blog posts.