If you want to skip the junk, and go straight to the solution, go to the last two code snippets at the end.

One variation, from stack overflow, goes something like this.

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
intent.setType("text/plain");
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_EMAIL  , new String[]{"recipient@example.com"});
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, "subject of email");
intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT   , "body of email");
startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Send mail..."));

The reason this doesn't work properly, is because it brings up pretty much any app that can handle text/plain content. To expect a user to send an email with bluetooth, or wifi, or evernote, is simply not appropriate. So, if your intention is to have them send an actual email, as opposed to sharing content in some other way, then this won't work for you.

Another variation from stack overflow, is to replace the mime-type of text/plain with message/rfc822. This results in a list of applications that can handle "email message" content. As a result, if you have ever-note installed, it comes up in the list as well. It will happily store your complete RFC822 email message for you. However, this is a hack, and is totally not appropriate. That mime type implies that you have already constructed a complete and valid RFC822 email message, including headers and what not.

Finally, I was able to find an example on the IT Wizard website, that shows the almost proper way of doing this, using the mailto URI handling.  Theoretically, only valid email applications will ever come up in this list. It goes like this...

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SENDTO, Uri.parse("mailto:someone@example.com"));
intent.putExtra("subject", "my subject");
intent.putExtra("body", "my message");
startActivity(intent);

Unfortunately, that only works with gmail on my phone.  So, I revised it to include everything inside the mailto url.

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SENDTO, Uri.parse("mailto:someone@example.com?subject=" +
    Uri.encode("my subject") +  "&body=" +
    Uri.encode("My big long body with spaces, new lines, and all sorts of invalid URI characters"));
startActivity(intent);

Now the only activities that come up are email apps. Now, if you want the complete list of email applications to always come up for the user, whether they've chosen a "default" email app or not, then you need to start the activity like this...

startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "your chooser title"));

I do not know how to attach files to an email, using this method; in fact I do not think it is possible, seeing the mailto: URL scheme is pretty limited.  So, unfortunately, if you want to attach files, you're going to have to use one of the other methods, with the EXTRA_STREAM option to putExtra() and file URI pointing to a file on your android device.  As a result, you'll just have to live with some non-email related applications coming up.

If someone has a way of making sure ONLY email apps come up, using the other methods, I'd sure like to hear about it.  Thanks.

1. updating proguard
2. not using libraries I shouldn't be
3. re-importing the project
4. removing duplicate android jars
5. removing all android jars
6. a host of other "suggestions" from Eclipse Android users

Not one of the ones I found worked.  I suddenly right clicked the project, and happened to see a menu called "Android Tools".  I wasn't thinking it would do anything for my predicament, but was curious what was under it.  I then saw, and clicked, the item called "Fix Project Properties", and voilà, the error disappeared.

Go figure, an Eclipse option to fix a problem that Eclipse caused.  KEWL!

Hope this helps someone through their pain.

IntelliJ folks, PLEASE add GUI support for android, so that I can ditch this piece of junk Java IDE called Eclipse.

Before we get started, the code for part 3 is located on github under the tag "part3".  You should be able to switch to that tag and download a tar.gz of the code.   Or you can simply clone it as follows.

git clone git://github.com/TrentonAdams/HelloAndroid.git HelloAndroid
cd HelloAndroid
git checkout part3

In this video, we will

1. explain the various sections of code
2. explain the semantics of the android R class for referencing resources
3. explain the use of localized resource files

We have one new screenshot from this video in the series.  It is the French version of the application.

If this video fails to play, please check back later, it may still be processing.

I searched Google to no avail.  I was completely unable to use the correct search terms to find anything relevant, except to find that others were having the same problems.  But, I found no solutions in any of the posts I found, or even hints of how to diagnose such a thing.  So, I finally decided that I should be a programmer instead of a user.  After all, I moved to Ubuntu so that I could be a user; I don't really have the time to be tinkering with my system these days.

My new system is made up of the following core components

• ASUS P8P67 EVO motherboard
• I7 2600k
• eVGA GeForce GTX 460 video card

So, after having put on my programmers cap, I decided to go fishing.  Obviously the first place I looked was /var/log/syslog.  In there, I found the following...

Jul 20 21:56:39 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9607.079961] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800384] irq 16: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800386] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P            2.6.38-10-generic #46-Ubuntu
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800387] Call Trace:
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800389]  <IRQ>  [<ffffffff810d51ab>] ? __report_bad_irq.clone.2+0x2b/0xa0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800395]  [<ffffffff810d55aa>] ? note_interrupt+0x19a/0x1e0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800396]  [<ffffffff810d649d>] ? handle_fasteoi_irq+0xdd/0x110
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800399]  [<ffffffff8100e9c2>] ? handle_irq+0x22/0x40
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800402]  [<ffffffff815cb33d>] ? do_IRQ+0x5d/0xe0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800404]  [<ffffffff815c3693>] ? ret_from_intr+0x0/0x15
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800405]  <EOI>  [<ffffffff81336c8a>] ? intel_idle+0xca/0x120
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800409]  [<ffffffff81336c69>] ? intel_idle+0xa9/0x120
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800411]  [<ffffffff814a3e5a>] ? cpuidle_idle_call+0xaa/0x1b0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800414]  [<ffffffff8100a266>] ? cpu_idle+0xa6/0xf0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800416]  [<ffffffff815a94d5>] ? rest_init+0x75/0x80
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800418]  [<ffffffff81acac90>] ? start_kernel+0x3f5/0x400
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800421]  [<ffffffff81aca388>] ? x86_64_start_reservations+0x132/0x136
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800423]  [<ffffffff81aca45d>] ? x86_64_start_kernel+0xd1/0xe0
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800424] handlers:
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800425] [<ffffffffa0698e90>] (nv_kern_isr+0x0/0x80 [nvidia])
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800526] [<ffffffffa0c66020>] (rtl8169_interrupt+0x0/0x250 [r8169])
Jul 20 21:57:06 tda-desktop kernel: [ 9633.800529] Disabling IRQ #16

As you can see, two drivers are in use on IRQ 16; the nvidia and rtl8169 drivers. I ended up doing some more analysis by running lspci -v, which resulted in finding that my USB 3.0 devices, my rtl8169 ethernet chip, and my nVidia GTX 460 were all using the same interrupt (IRQ 16).  Normally sharing IRQs isn't so bad, so I'm thinking one or more of the drivers has a bug that occurs during idle times.

So, the thought came to me to restart my ethernet interface.  After doing that, my system was back to normal until the next time it happened.  Seeing that my motherboard has two ethernet interfaces, I plan on disabling the RealTek one, and activating the intel one, and see if that resolves it permanently.

Okay, I've finished another android development demo video.  Sorry it took so long, I got really busy with a new computer and what not, and life in general.  In the next video in this series, I will explain the details of the hello android application.  So, if you do not understand some of what is happening, stay tuned for the next video in the series.

Before we get started, the code for part 2 is located on github under the tag "part2".  You should be able to switch to that tag and download a tar.gz of the code.   Or you can simply clone it as follows.

git clone git://github.com/TrentonAdams/HelloAndroid.git HelloAndroid
cd HelloAndroid
git checkout part2

In this video, we do the following...

1. an actual android application with a button that opens a dialog box. The dialog box has a Okay/Cancel button.
2. Handling and implementing events
   1. onCreateDialog(int) - when a dialog is requested to be created in this activity, this method is called
   2. onClick(View arg0) - we tied the click event from the button to our activity rather than making a custom class for it
3. log debug information to the android log
4. use logcat to see the debug information

Below are the two screens that you will see in this application.

Hello Android Screenshot

Hello Android Okay/Cancel Dialog

This android demo was created using a software package under Linux called "recordMyDesktop".  It's terribly slow for encoding the video, which it does after the video has been recorded.  I think it's recording my whole screen as a series of screenshots, which is probably what takes it so long.  I used it from the command line, as I have not yet attempted to use a GUI tool with it.  I found that I basically required 240 fps, because it did not capture all of my selections if I did not use a high frame rate.  This time I decreased the quality and the bitrate, as it did not seem to make a huge impact on quality.

recordmydesktop --pause-shortcut Control+Shift+P --fps 240 --v_quality 30 --v_bitrate 400 -o ~/Videos/newvideo

This is based in part on the Android Hello World documentation at http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html

Add the following to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config

GSSAPIAuthentication no
GSSAPICleanupCredentials no

All that is required to be able to debug a unit test is

1. configure the maven surefire plugin from within a profile
2. activate the maven profile from the command line

The following XML profiles section will work just peachy for you.

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>dtest</id>
      <properties>
        <maven.test.skip>false</maven.test.skip>
      </properties>
      <build>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.5</version>
            <configuration>
              <forkMode>once</forkMode>
              <debugForkedProcess>true</debugForkedProcess>
            </configuration>
          </plugin>
        </plugins>
      </build>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

Now just run this.

  mvn -Pdtest package

• The process android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.

First I tried some suggestions to wipe the contact data by going into Settings->Application->Manage applications->All and then to force stop and wipe the data of the "Contacts" and "Contacts Storage" applications.  This made the application sync the data from gmail again.  I opened the contacts, and watched the data being synced live, and then suddenly a "Force Close" button pops up once again.

Then I decided to investigate using the "adb logcat" command using the Android Development environment.  This resulted in the stack trace at the bottom of this page.  This clued me in that there was something wrong with my contacts with photos.  So, I went to gmail, removed all my photos from my contacts, and synced.  This did not resolve the issue, but I was watching from within the contacts application, as the contacts were syncing, and saw that it was also showing my twitter contacts, with photos.  Suddenly, the force close box came up again.

So, I simply uninstalled twitter, and all is now fine.  I hope this helps someone resolve their issue.

E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): FATAL EXCEPTION: main
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): java.lang.NullPointerException: key == null || value == null
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.util.LruCache.put(LruCache.java:146)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.ContactPhotoManagerImpl.loadCachedPhoto(ContactPhotoManager.java:291)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.ContactPhotoManagerImpl.loadPhotoByIdOrUri(ContactPhotoManager.java:248)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.ContactPhotoManagerImpl.loadPhoto(ContactPhotoManager.java:232)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.list.ContactListAdapter.bindPhoto(ContactListAdapter.java:256)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.list.DefaultContactListAdapter.bindView(DefaultContactListAdapter.java:224)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.common.widget.CompositeCursorAdapter.getView(CompositeCursorAdapter.java:392)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.common.widget.CompositeCursorAdapter.getView(CompositeCursorAdapter.java:341)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.HeaderViewListAdapter.getView(HeaderViewListAdapter.java:220)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.AbsListView.obtainView(AbsListView.java:1970)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.ListView.makeAndAddView(ListView.java:1756)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.ListView.fillDown(ListView.java:656)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.ListView.fillSpecific(ListView.java:1314)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.ListView.layoutChildren(ListView.java:1587)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.widget.AutoScrollListView.layoutChildren(AutoScrollListView.java:65)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.AbsListView.onLayout(AbsListView.java:1800)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.widget.PinnedHeaderListView.onLayout(PinnedHeaderListView.java:125)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1542)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutVertical(LinearLayout.java:1403)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:1314)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1542)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutVertical(LinearLayout.java:1403)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:1314)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.contacts.widget.InterpolatingLayout.onLayout(InterpolatingLayout.java:309)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:400)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:400)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.setChildFrame(LinearLayout.java:1542)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.layoutVertical(LinearLayout.java:1403)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.LinearLayout.onLayout(LinearLayout.java:1314)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.widget.FrameLayout.onLayout(FrameLayout.java:400)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.View.layout(View.java:9588)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewGroup.layout(ViewGroup.java:3877)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewRoot.performTraversals(ViewRoot.java:1259)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.view.ViewRoot.handleMessage(ViewRoot.java:2009)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:132)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4025)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:491)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:841)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:599)
E/AndroidRuntime( 8243): 	at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)
W/ActivityManager(  143):   Force finishing activity com.android.contacts/.activities.ContactBrowserActivity

My intention is to make all of my android videos as simple as possible, and as short as possible. That way you can learn what you need to, and get on with it.

This is a quick demo on how to get started on developing for Android.  It is "hopefully" the first in a serious of android demo videos that I will be creating.  I am mainly creating them for myself, so as to become familiar with basic android development tasks, and also to play with recording sessions; I too am a newbie to Android development.  I am putting them on YouTube in case anyone else may find them valuable; perhaps for their simplicity.  I hope you enjoy.

This android demo was created using a software package under Linux called "recordMyDesktop".  I used it from the command line, as I have not yet attempted to use a GUI tool with it.  I found that I basically required 60 fps, because it did not capture all of my selections if I did not use a high frame rate.

recordmydesktop --fps 60 --v_bitrate 3500 -o helloandroid.ogv

This is based in part on the Android Hello World documentation at http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html

This does not happen every time. Usually it will show you both versions of the documents if there was a conflict.

So, be careful, evernote loses data.