http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/85072/?lang=EN

Since BlackBerry’s PlayBook can run android applications, they promoted for Android developers to submit an application to their AppWorld, and get a free PlayBook.

I didn’t have to change any code in Simple Lister, just signed/ported it per BlackBerry’s instructions.  I’m curious to see how it will run on the PlayBook, so we’ll see how that goes when mine arrives!

Since I’m running ICS on my Nexus S, I wanted to bring Simple Lister up to date with the latest and greatest. I also didn’t want to ruin any backwards compatibility.

Turns out this was easier than expected, AND the application is fully backwards compatible with Android 1.6 (Donut).

Holo Theme

To get the basic “holo” theme, all I had to do was update the ‘uses-sdk’ line in the androidManifest.xml to target a version from Honeycomb (11) or higher:

SDK line in androidManifest.xml

Bam, everything came along for the ride, the default dark holo theme, the action bar at top.

Action Bar icons

Now, since we had a shiny new action bar, I might as well move menu items to that.  All I had to do was go into my appropriate menu.xml and add the following to the items I want in the menu bar

android:showAsAction='ifRoom|withText'

So, that will display the appropriate icon in the action bar (if there is room) and display the title with it (if there is room).

The one caveat with the change in our menu.xml, make sure you update your “Project Build Target” in the project properties to at least API 11 if you are using Eclipse.

Eclipse - Build Target properties

In Summary

I did 3 simple changes to make my app happy for ICS:

1. Updated androidManifest.xml’s <uses-sdk> element  to include android:targetSdkVersion="11" (or higher)
2. Updated menu.xml files to include android:showAsAction='ifRoom|withText' to display icons on the Action Bar
3. Eclipse only: Updated Project Properties – Build Target to at least API 11

What’s next?

While this gives us the most basic of ICS (and I suppose Honeycomb) look/style and the Action Bar, there are still more changes I can make:

• Updating the icon in the Action Bar to return to the ‘home’ action
• Adding more icons to the Action Bar
• Updating the Action Bar title to display the note’s title, and not just “Simple Lister”
• Looking into how Gmail on ICS has an upper and lower action bar
• and I’m sure there’s more, which I’ll get into in later posts.

After MONTHS of sitting with Simple Lister v0.4 and no changes for ages, I’ve FINALLY gotten around to finalizing my changes for v0.5.

The bulk of these changes include full background synchronization.  No more will the user be forced to wait while a note is being added/updated/trashed/etc.  Read/modify your notes even without a network connection.

Simple Lister Free (ad supported) – Simple Lister Pro ($0.99 no ads)

Side note: If you make changes to your note with Simple Lister and SimpleNote at the same time, it will not be sync’ed.  I need to properly handle a merge situation.