In this assignment, you will learn how to create an application using the Android OS. The application will place pins on a map at the spots that you last saw your friends. The application UI will be simple and consist only of a list of your friends and the map (with pins representing your friend's location). When you see your friend you simply click their name and the application places a pin on the map at your current location. The entire application will function within a device emulator that is packaged with the android SDK.
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Before you can begin writing your first android application you need to configure your environment. In order to configure your environment you will need to follow the Getting Started Guide. While going through the entire guide would be useful the most important parts are the first four sections ("Installing..." through "Autonomy...").
The next step is to create the eclipse project that will contain your assignment. Follow the steps provided in the "Hello Android" documentation but use the following values...
Now we have provided you with some helper classes and configuration files to make the assignment easier. Please copy the following files into the specified directories.
Finally you need to include the following XML snippets in the AndroidManifest.xml, which is at the root of the project. After opening the file in eclipse, place the following lines in the specified locations in the XML.
To make this worthwhile you will first need to add some friends to your emulator's contact manager. To do this you will need to start the emulator. You can do this by telling eclipse to run your application. After starting your application follow these steps...
Android uses a service-oriented architecture by making most of the phone's features available via ContentProviders. We will use the existing "Contacts" content provider to programatically get a list of all of your friends. Information on how to retrieve data from a content provider can be found in this document. You will add your code to the FriendViewAdaptor.java file and upon success you will see the contacts listed at the top portion of the application.
To help you along we have provided a class called GPSWrapper which has only one static method. Calling this method will return random GPS coordinates around Centennial campus. This class allows you to emulate getting GPS data from the devices built-in GPS sensor. When testing this with a real device, you can replace the logic in this class with code that retrieves data from the sensor. Fortunately, this is outside the scope of this assignment, so you can leave the GPSWrapper class as is.
The final portion of the project is placing a marker on the map at the location where you last saw your friend. To assist in this process we have provided the FriendsMapOverlay class. Before we make use of this class we must first get the map to display within our application to do this we need to generate an Maps API key. To generate the key you must...
Now that you have a map all we need to do is put markers on the map when you click one of your friends names. The code to recognize when a name is clicked has been provided and results in the execution of the method addMarkerAtCurrentLocation(String markerName) in FriendMapper.java. It is your responsibility to complete this method to ensure the follow happens...
