Saturday, January 21, 2012

Slashdot Reader Widget for Android - Maintenance

As soon as I released the original version of the Slashdot widget, I realized  that Android 3.0+ (honeycomb and ice cream sandwich) allows natively scrollable widgets (at least in the vertical direction) and this is much nicer on bigger screens, no such luck for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or prior versions of course.

The nice thing about Android and the Market Place is that it's relatively easy to work around this using the android:minsdkversion and android:maxSdkVersion elements of AndroidManifest.xml.

At this point I've developed 2 versions of the widget.

Version A:
- Targets Android 2.2 & 2.3 AndroidManifest.xml contains:
<uses-sdk android:minsdkversion="8" android:maxsdkversion="10"/>
- Uses custom arrow buttons for scrolling and switching between stories

Version B:
- Targets Android 3.0+ AndroidManifest.xml contains:
<uses-sdk android:minsdkversion="11"/>
- Uses ListView backed by a Collection

I did a build of both and publish them both concurrently in the Market Place - no problem :)