Category Archives: Third Party

Using 3rd Party Libraries

Task Butler uses two open source third party libraries: ActionBar Sherlock and AmbilWarna

ActionBarSherlock is an excellent library that emulates the Ice Cream Sandwich action bar in older versions of Android. This was crucial for our app because we were developing for 2.2+, and having to design an entirely different UI would have been inelegant and a massive amount of extra work. Jake Wharton’s ABS uses the same API calls as Android’s official library, so one can follow Google’s API specification to use his library. Google has its own support library with limited features available, but ABS is a much more complete solution. It was critical to the design of our UI and I thank him for developing it and releasing it for free.

The AmbilWarna color picker dialog is a neat piece of code that provides a color selector for users. We needed a way for users to pick colors for their categories and this seemed like a much nicer solution than giving users limited choices like other apps do. Picture attached.

ColorPicker_1

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.