Category Archives: Mobile Apps

Every Android application makes use of the facilities of the user’s phone (or pad or device). These facilities include memory, storage, the internet, GPS location services, phone book, and so on. Most of these facilities are straight-forward enough. But many … Continue reading →

Dublin Buzz uses the preferences storage mechanism for storing users’ favourites. This is an ideal mechanism – very easy to use, persistent between application launches, and doesn’t require any special permissions or access to SD cards or external memory. In … Continue reading →

I have explained in an earlier post how to display Google Maps. In Dublin Buzz, every map opens centred on the sight and also contains a red dot and text label for the sight. This was more complicated to achieve … Continue reading →

One of the major features of Dublin Buzz – and what makes it a mobile application – is its knowledge about the user’s whereabouts. This is obtained by using the built-in GPS location chip on the Android device, if it … Continue reading →

All sights in Dublin Buzz can be sorted by the user, in one of three ways – alphabetically, by distance, or by “popularity”. (I define popularity somewhat subjectively!). In any case, it requires a little Java trick combined with a … Continue reading →

Using Dublin Buzz makes it incredibly easy to view sights and read all about them. If you have been convinced by the sight’s description that you would like to visit, then it is a simple matter to then find out … Continue reading →

Users of the Dublin Buzz application can add sights to their list of favourites. This makes them easily accessible at a later time. If you fancy popping down to a sight after reading about it, you can simple hit the … Continue reading →

Dublin Buzz uses the Android Intent system to either launch other internal activities (e.g. when viewing a sight) or launching external ones (e.g. launching a web browser). Intents can be thought of as a very general, flexible, dynamic messaging system. … Continue reading →

Let’s start by letting you download the source code. Feel free to do what you will with this code! DublinBuzz WordPress has forced me to upload a document file format, so you need to load this text into your favourite … Continue reading →

Here are some cool screen grabs of the running application to whet your appetite: This is the opening screen, with all of the sights listed alphabetically. Obviously, the main plus of using a mobile device is to be able to … Continue reading →