To follow up my last post, here are some practical advice if you are interested in moving to Gradle and Android Studio. Once you’ve set up a working gradle build, all you have to do is select “Import Project” in Android Studio and it will sort everything out. Compare that to importing projects in Eclipse which is a pure nightmare.
Root directory and settings file This is important if your project is split into several libraries.
Over the last year, several people have asked me add support this and that synchronization alternative. It sounds easy enough but it’s actually quite a complicated thing. As I’m now implementing support for Org-mode, I thought I’d write a bit about the process.
Getting notified about changes To allow for editing tasks both in the app and in the files directly, the synchronization service will have to monitor both the database and the fileystem.
Source on GitHub
Extendable for other sources Can select multiple items Directories or files Create directory in the picker Yet another file picker library? I needed a file picker that had two primary properties:
Easy to extend: I needed a file picker that would work for normal files on the SD-card, and also for using the Dropbox Sync API. Able to create a directory in the picker.
One of the oldest feature requests for my notes app that still is not implemented is plain file storage. It’s not entirely trivial to keep the files and the database in sync while also avoiding conflicts with Google Tasks. And because I never had any need of it myself, it always got a very low priority.
However, after a user introduced me to org-mode I have felt more and more need of this.
So step 1 of the process to a proper Android client for org-mode is more or less complete. The library can be found on GitHub. It’s a plain old java library that builds a jar file which can be included in other projects. It has one requirement which is included in the lib-folder: Joda Time.
Coding this up I really came to hate the built in Date and Calendar classes in Java.