Share My Creation Simple web app to show plant information

I have just found enough time to run up a very simple program as a sort of preliminary to working on the re-write of my much larger B4ppc database program.

This one just displays information, and pics if available, about plant varieties - taken from the MySQL database on my website. On the web side, it has its own PHP routines so that the bandwidth used is kept to the absolute minimum.

The program is really not much more than a re-work of some of the tutorials and other posts here on the forum - many thanks to Erel, Andrew and Klaus :icon_clap:

It uses the HTTP lib (obviously), SQLite as temporary cache storage for search results and Reflection to size the text pages.

I have a problem though - still no real Android device - :sign0137: -- It looks OK on the emulator but any feedback from running on the real thing would be nice!!
 

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mistermentality

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I tried a few times with the search term "ros" but first few times it froze my screen, I tried with a different term and it worked then retried ros as a term and found out why it froze - there were a lot of possible results so it probably didn't freeze because of any error on the apps part.

I like it, very detailed and I suspect, for the people who would use it, very useful. It displays pictures and textual information fine on my 320x480 GT540 phone so I can confirm that on a real device it does run fine.

Would be even better with a quit button as only way to quit the app is to go to the settings menu on my phone and choose to kill the currently running application with the name Plant Base Online but that is easy to sort maybe either a button to click or the user just types exit as a search term.

Very very detailed database though, must have taken a long time to accumulate all that data. Very nice app :)

Dave
 
agraham

agraham

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mistermentality said:
Would be even better with a quit button as only way to quit the app is to go to the settings menu ...
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The Android application architecture does not require quit buttons. You don't need to kill progams. Android takes care of managing applications and memory, that is why Activities have a lifecycle.
 
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glook

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Thanks Dave - I really appreciate the feedback. And Andrew also - that's essentially the assumption I've been running with, but I'm still getting my head around the life-cycle thing. I guess that might be true for quite a lot of people, so it's valuable to kick the topic around a bit!
 
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mistermentality

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agraham said:
The Android application architecture does not require quit buttons. You don't need to kill progams. Android takes care of managing applications and memory, that is why Activities have a lifecycle.
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I understand that but they do still use up some memory and on a phone like mine with not a lot of RAM it can sometimes mean you have to use a task killer to free up some memory.

But I know it isn't necessary just handy in some situations I think rather than having it sitting around idle if you don't plan to use it again for a while.

Dave
 
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Merlot2309

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Hello,

It's running fine on my HTC Legend, didn't freeze on "ros" and when I use the "Back"-button a few times the program quits fine.

I would like it if you line out syn, family and plant type like you did with the other fields.
And, as Dave wrote, very nice and detailed.
Compliments.

Helen.
 
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glook

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Thanks again for the feedback thus far. There is a new version in the first post - 1.0.2

For the time being I've added a Quit button for Activity.Finish, though I assume this is much the same as hitting the back button. I've started reading some of the design guidelines on android.com - but as I'm not a Java programmer, it's a bit heavy going! Of course I will be especially interested in further discusions here about "best practices" - specially for bigger apps.

I would like it if you line out syn, family and plant type
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@ Helen - agreed and some adjustment done. The text is just shown in a big Label view and lining up is with TAB constants. Not quite as simple as it first appears - turns out that the Tabs behave a little differently with each screen scale factor. Some records also have a line wrap that doesn't look very nice. Still playing with these things!!

Geoff.
 
aklisiewicz

aklisiewicz

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glook said:
It uses the HTTP lib (obviously), SQLite as temporary cache storage for search results and Reflection to size the text pages.

I have a problem though - still no real Android device - :sign0137: -- It looks OK on the emulator but any feedback from running on the real thing would be nice!!
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do you plan to share your code ?
Arthur
 
G

glook

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aklisiewicz said:
do you plan to share your code ?
Arthur
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Arthur, just noticed your post - haven't visited here much recently as I'm very busy with other things (but indirectly connected with my B4A stuff).

I'm not planning to post entire code - I generally don't make source code public, at least not for programs that are part of my business. This is not specific to B4A/B4PPC, it applies to my desktop stuff also. I've had problems in the past with attempted cloned applications and even unauthorised re-use of my data!

As it happens, all the methods used in this little app have already been well covered by tutorials and so on.

Of course, I've no problem with posting sections or example code to illustrate any relevant points.

Geoff.
 
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MoskmaN

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im trying to program a blog reader like de engadget , but for my personal page , you can share you b4a project code? im try to learn from there.

Sorry my bad inglish :D
 
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shekman

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Just curious if you have had any luck with this app and wanted to know if it's possible if you could share how you set up the app and how it talks to a database on a webserver using php mysql and not using SQLite. I am about to develop an app that will query wine bottle purchases from a website. Any tips or links to tutorials would be greatly appreciated.
 
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shekman

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Just curious if you have had any luck with this app and wanted to know if it's possible if you could share how you set up the app and how it talks to a database on a webserver using php mysql and not using SQLite. I am about to develop an app that will query wine bottle purchases from a website. Any tips or links to tutorials would be greatly appreciated. :sign0104:
 
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AMK

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Any chance of uploading the project file..
I'd like to learn more, as I'm thinking of creating a similar app..
 
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