Develop Bugs

[Q] A doubtless foolish question about wallpaper

I apologize in advance for what must be a foolish question. My inability to locate an answer when I search the forums just helps reinforce the notion that the answer is glaringly obvious, so I fully expect to be taken to task for having an IQ slightly below that of the average potted plant.
When I install a ROM on my Epic, and sometimes even when I simply apply a theme, it often has a very nice wallpaper that accompanies it. If I browse other wallpapers in any of what I would consider the "usual" locations (Wallpaper, Live Wallpapers & Gallery), I can't help but notice that the theme's wallpaper is not among the available choices. The implication is that if I were to select a different wallpaper - even just to see how it might look - I would be unable to return to the theme's wallpaper without re-flashing. Surely this can't be right?
Am I missing something? Wouldn't it make sense to simply include the wallpaper as a standard, everyday typical wallpaper, easliy accessible through the usual menus? Or is there, perhaps, some way of choosing "no wallpaper," which would default to the theme's background image?

default wallpaper is located in 2 places,one I know for sure is in the framework-res,the other I cant remeber,Ill have to wait to get to my PC when I get to the houe,in about 2 hours...
Sent from my Frankenstein FROYO using XDA App...

Lol its ok I spent about 2 hours banging my head against the wall trying to figure this out too...but I found it out, so here's mine in my case:
I have emotionless beast theme, so that was the default wallpaper I was looking for. You'll need an explorer like astro file manager.
Go to the very root of the phone (keep hitting up till your in the folder simply named "/"
Navigate to "system", then to "framework"
In there is a .apk, not a folder, named framework-res (there prbly is a folder too but that's not what you want). Click it, astro will bring you up a menu, and hit "browse file"
In the next screen navigate to "res", then to "drawable-hdpi"
Finally you're in the right folder. Scroll down till you see the picture file named "default_wallpaper"...this should be it
Now remember, this is simply my case...but I suspect its a standard practice for devs to put the wallpaper there in most roms so I'm betting it'll work for whatever you're using
NOTE: you can't take a shortcut and simply search for "default_wallpaper" since its located in an .apk file, which astro doesn't search through.
Hope this helps!
Sent from my baked and emotionless SPH-D700

^
Squishy figured it out. It is tucked away in framework-res, where people who don't know better would probably never look.

DiGi760 said:
^
Squishy figured it out. It is tucked away in framework-res, where people who don't know better would probably never look.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yayy me!
Sent from my baked and emotionless SPH-D700

Thank you very much, squshy 7!
I believe you're entirely correct about finding it again, but I wonder if you (or anyone else) might have some idea as to why something so apparently simple as changing your wallpaper has to be so complex an affair as to force one to acquire software he might not own to look in places he'd never otherwise go to find files he might not know about and break them open to tinker about in areas he probably has no business messing around with...all to put back a silly wallpaper he didn't mean to change in the first place? Shouldn't part of the experience involve a certain amount of "user friendliness?"
Obviously, I'm no developer (potted plant-brained folk need not apply), so perhaps there's a reason why a ROM or Theme can't install the wallpaper in such a way as to become more easily accessible? Is it a problem with permissions that prevents copying the wallpaper into the appropriate directory? An issue with protecting the developer (as in, preventing his wallpaper from being distributed separately from his ROM/Theme? Something else entirely?
At any rate, thank you very much squshy 7! I appreciate your having pointed me in the right direction!

I think he just stuck it in the default hiding place for internal wall-papers. Each of google's launchers also has some internal wallpapers that are tucked away from people. Changing your wallpaper is easy. Changing back to image that is hidden from you is tougher.

DiGi760 said:
Changing your wallpaper is easy. Changing back to image that is hidden from you is tougher.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exactly my point! I'm just curious about why it should be hidden away in the first place - and not just a single ROM/Theme, but so far every one I've tried.
Since I'm fairly certain there's not some world-wide conspiracy of developers to go out of there way to make such an apparently simple thing difficult for their end users, it struck me that there must be a reason behind it, and while I appreciate squshy 7's work-around and can certainly follow his instructions, it leaves me curious about why anyone should have to.
Please note: My problem is fixed - it's now just my curiousity that wonders at the need for such complexities.

If I had to take a guess, it probably is for the same thing you are calling in to question: simplicity.
Think about it: changing the default (stock) wallpapers is easy enough...but have you ever actually "seen" the wallpapers, as in where they are located?
I haven't, simply because I've never looked. But we never wonder because they're so readily accessible from the wallpaper changer.
Again this sounds like they're doing nothing but making it harder for themselves and us. Why not put the default wallpaper for your ROM in the same location as the other wallpapers so its easier for us to change back and forth?
In my opinion, in that question lies what I feel is the answer: because maybe it's easier for them to put it in that drawable-hdpi.apk for some reason. So we're brought back to simplicity; it's just in this case it's for the devs sake.
All of this is, of course, entirely conjecture. I'm no dev and I really have no idea. But I think it's sound reasoning right?
Because all humans are lazy lol.
Sent from my baked and emotionless SPH-D700

squshy 7 said:
Why not put the default wallpaper for your ROM in the same location as the other wallpapers so its easier for us to change back and forth?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Those other default wallpapers that aren't from your gallery are usually built in to the launcher in a similar way.

DiGi760 said:
Those other default wallpapers that aren't from your gallery are usually built in to the launcher in a similar way.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ah - I think I'm beginning to understand. In other words, there's no there there. There's no single place, repository, directory or folder into which any installed image magically becomes a wallpaper? And if a developer wanted to make his wallpaper more "accessible" in a way that would simplify our lives, he'd have to sort of "crack open" whatever launcher we might be using and insert it, which is neither likely nor desirable. Do I have that right?
If so, then the best we could hope for would be an easily accessible copy of the wallpaper that we could insert into our own gallery for future use - which would still be preferable to the digital gymnastics currently required.
I'm slow, but I do get there eventually. Thanks for helping me sort it all out.

Pretty much. Sometimes you have to do the work to pull a wallpaper out of a launcher or framework-res. Once you have it, changing your wallpaper to it is the easy part.
If I go to change my wallpaper, it asks me to select wallpaper from:
Home screen wallpaper
Live wallpapers
Wallpaper gallery
Wallpapers (com.android.launcher)
Wallpapers (com.ebproductions.android.launcher)
The last three are for different launchers. The next to last one has the stock Epic wallpapers. These wallpapers are all stored in the apks.
I'd be willing to bet that there is a way to simply put the wallpaper in folder and point some setting to it. It isn't done that way because by default, that stuff is all packed in to different things where it is nice and self-contained and many rom developers just adjust the default settings until they have a reason to make a departure.

[REQUEST] How to edit app-drawer background

I really love the new graphic style in Android ICS, especially for the blue fades that replaced those horrible plain black backgrounds in almost every list/app/screen. However, the app drawer background is still completely dark, and I was wondering...is there a .png or a file in the android framework, that lets us customizing the app drawer background opacity or better, the entire drawer background image?
The settings blue fade background would be a lot better of plain black, for example. Can you at least point me to the right direction? Thanks in advance!

The app drawer is part of the launcher, I believe, so poking around inside the launcher's .apk file would probably be a good place to start. That said, I probably know less about modding Android than you do, so I could be dead wrong...

Actually, I think this too - despite I talked about the 'framework'. The problem is, that a common android application is made up by a res folder, full of .pngs and pictures, and a lot of other folders that contain all the .xmls for the app itself, that I never achieved to edit in any way. And because I'm sure the drawer background is part of a style .xml, probably being defined by a string such as "background_color=0,0,0/transparency=0" (example taken by some .xmls edited on PC, I actually have no idea of how these things are written in android), it could be useful to know where to find something like that or how to edit this kind of values ;P

C'mon, I can't believe everyone actually never tought of changing the drawer background! I mean...this is one of the first feature that you -devs of several alt. launchers- will have to add, and so far (think to ADW) it has not been so difficoult! So...please, if you know something on that, point me to the right file or config!
I downloaded Launcher2.apk, extracted it, and gone through each single file inside. And "Drawer Layout" or "Drawer Background" aren't there. What could I do next?

Looking at the Launcher2 source, it is a xml file in the drawables folder named wallpaper_gallery_background.xml.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

wallpaper_gallery_background.xml - it was one of my search result for "backgound" keyword. But I went over it, since I think is related to the wallpaper picker (the little gallery of wallpapers at the bottom of the wallpaper selection screen...). Any other ideas?
p.s.: Happy that finally someone is paying attention to this topic... xda doesn't help people with a few posts or subscribed only some months ago (and that doesn't implies that they're newbie or dumb è_é) in ANY WAY... ;D I think this would be a very appreciated feature, this thread has a lot of views in just 1 day and a half!

I will play around with the source and get back with you.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium

Only thing I could find in Launcher2 is in drawable-xhdpi. The first PNG is apps_customize_bg.png and its a black image. Didn't see any XML files related to app drawer, which leads me to think its all hidden in smali code or another apk.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

@AndHel Great! That's the answer I was waiting for! Thank you so much...I hope we'll be able to find something relatively easy to handle ;D
BTW, it would be very interesting knowing a bit more about Android decompiling and modding...if you want, explain me (even very quickly) how will you reach certain files/configurations, if you'll do, when you'll do.
@mb02 Thank you for your efforts too, I hope you're wrong but I fear you're right...absolutely not even a single word that remembers the "app drawer"! Maybe with your patience, we'll find out more!
...and I keep searching around /system for any kind of thing graphic-related to this damned drawer ;P

ledoweb said:
@AndHel Great! That's the answer I was waiting for! Thank you so much...I hope we'll be able to find something relatively easy to handle ;D
BTW, it would be very interesting knowing a bit more about Android decompiling and modding...if you want, explain me (even very quickly) how will you reach certain files/configurations, if you'll do, when you'll do.
@mb02 Thank you for your efforts too, I hope you're wrong but I fear you're right...absolutely not even a single word that remembers the "app drawer"! Maybe with your patience, we'll find out more!
...and I keep searching around /system for any kind of thing graphic-related to this damned drawer ;P
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In every iteration of Android prior, including skinned versions (Sense, TW, blur) the app drawer coding and images resided in the launcher (Rosie, Launcher, etc). The naming, however, wasn't ever "app drawer" but "all apps" as drawer was never he official term for the all apps view. Rosie launcher had multiple XML files in the Rosie.apk res/layout folder that dealt with this "all apps" as well as related images. With the absence of anything related to apps in this Launcher2.apk, I feel as though everything was moved to smali or in another apk, unless they cleverly hid it in another XML in Launcher2.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA App

It's within /res/layout in Launcher2. The file is called apps_customize_pane.xml
Just change the 2 values ff000000 into something else, i.e. bb000000 to make them slightly transparent.

It sounds promising...i thought that file was for a screen called "apps customization"
...may I ask which other letters could I use to increase/decrease opacity? AFAIK, numbers are for color and letters are for alpha...right?
Anyway, thanks so much for this solution! - I'll give it a try as far as I can. BTW, no way to replace a colour with something better, like a .png? Maybe just removing that string, and replacing it with something slightly different...
Edit: I'm having troubles in editing that .xml. Apktool fails decompiling Launcer2.apk probably because I'm using an old version of the android SDK, and this means...that I'm stuck at unreadable .xmls. I'm waiting for the SDK manager to have all updates installed, and then I might be able to finally "undress" this damned drawer ;P

This is likely harder than you expect. A few technical notes (and yes it's possible this will be a Nova feature in the future but it's not officially planned at this time).
1) App drawer is indeed called "AppsCustomizePagedView"
2) When viewing the app drawer, the launcher disables the wallpaper from showing (I believe as an optimization). I think if you made the drawer fully transparent you would see (in order from top to bottom):
Drawer
Smaller sized home screens
Black background
If you're editing source you can prevent the black background by changing updateWallpaperVisibility(). To hide the home screens you'd probably have to change the animation code in showAppsCustomizeHelper which could be a bit tricky.

[email protected] said:
This is likely harder than you expect. A few technical notes (and yes it's possible this will be a Nova feature in the future but it's not officially planned at this time).
1) App drawer is indeed called "AppsCustomizePagedView"
2) When viewing the app drawer, the launcher disables the wallpaper from showing (I believe as an optimization). I think if you made the drawer fully transparent you would see (in order from top to bottom):
Drawer
Smaller sized home screens
Black background
If you're editing source you can prevent the black background by changing updateWallpaperVisibility(). To hide the home screens you'd probably have to change the animation code in showAppsCustomizeHelper which could be a bit tricky.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i managed to get the app drawer transparent and indeed a black background..
but cant find updatewallpapervisibility anywhere
where can it be found? is it a xml or in a xml ?
thnx!

For that you have to edit source files and recompile, it's not just an XML edit.
Sent from The Past into The Future via The Present.

Milamber33 said:
For that you have to edit source files and recompile, it's not just an XML edit.
Sent from The Past into The Future via The Present.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ok!thnx!
i found the trebuchet source on gethub
i managed to change the source so the black screen and all is gone and the drawer is transparent.. but i cant test it because i dont know how to compile it
can you tell me ? thnx

There are plenty of tutorials on setting up an Android build environment and compiling the source floating around. They will be far more detailed and useful than I could be.
Sent from The Past into The Future via The Present.

I did it
I made it transparent its on a thread i started

locomain said:
I did it
I made it transparent its on a thread i started
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Where is the thread?

Im gonna play around with this a bit when I have the chance....
But, using APKtool to decompile or recompile is very similar....
If you already have apktool all setup with your Roms framework file, and you already decompiled the file...... to recompile, all you have to do is use the command "apktool b foldername"
where folder name is the folder that it decompiled the apk to (likely Launcher2)

[REQUEST] Another tile layer OR tile folders

Hello guys!
I love the Windows start screen, the tiles, the metro UI, whatever it's called.
I really hope you can help me out because I can't find any solution to my request all over the whole internet.
What I want is a tile on the Windows start screen namend "Office" and clicking on it opens a whole new tile layer (like the start screen) but just containing my office apps like word, excel etc. as tiles (not regular desktop shortcuts)
I would like to do so with games too.
This new layer can be on full screen (maybe with a "back" button) or inside a quarter depending on the amount of icons it contains like it is with folders on Android home screens.
I don't want to "spam" my Windows start screen over with hundret of games and other stuff to keep me scrolling to the right like a minute before I get to the shortcut/tile I want.
Also I don't want to make a folder on the regular desktop containing all office shortcuts and pin it to the startmenu because clicking on it will open a "usual old ugly explorer window". But I want it to open in the same style as the main start screen is. Either in a new layer or a folder like window like in Android. When I looked this up the last days I couldn't believe there doesn't exist anything like this already because it keeps the start screen much cleaner and is a great feature for Android start screens.
So... is there any solution?
Cheers from Germany
Tarik
PS: If I was not allowed to ask for this here, sorry. Couldn't find any other corner to do so.

General would have been the right place, as this is a request rather than something you're offering, but it *is* a good idea.

Such a shame no one's got a solution. I wonder whether a gif animation showing what I want may would help?

Feel free to make one, but I think people have a pretty good idea what you're after. It's not that easy to make, though. Microsoft hasn't technically prevented people from implementing something like this, at least on x86/x64 Win8, but they have hidden/failed to document the APIs we would need.

[Q] App with multiple tabs - how to design

I am working on an app which will have multiple tabs. Having more than four tabs on the main screen would look ugly. What could be a right approach for designing such an app? Is there a way to design it in such a way that in feature I can add more features in app?

Tab is okay. But you may try Viewpager together with Tablayout. There's a lot of code examples on how to do it.

Cuong Phan said:
Tab is okay. But you may try Viewpager together with Tablayout. There's a lot of code examples on how to do it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Adding on that: the tabs don't need to span the entire width of the device. If there are more tabs than space they can simple be hidden until the users swipes to them. From a user perspective this is probably not so super great, since
a) the user can't see what's in the final tabs
b) to go from one tab to another if there a lots of tabs in between is a lot of work.
Maybe think about an alternative way to structure the main layout of your app?

what about putting them into four categories and then having tabs inside them, i use swipe in mine but as the other poster says that can be off putting when theres a lot in between to swipe past

I've had this problem
The first question should be "do you need that many different tabs?" Are they all of equal importance? Could some be combined? Could some be put under 1 settings menu? Could many of them live under and hamburger menu?
If you really do need > 4 tabs you can have them carousel at the top. Content apps do this well. If you have a content app then it makes sense to have several tabs. Users will be in a browse mode anyways. Look at Pinterest, Reddit apps and stuff like that. They handle it well.
I'd ask myself and probably my users "what are the 2 most important things my app does" and make those easy to get to.

[Q, Nova] Improving the Restore process

So, my old phone's screen died. As it happens, I still have access to it via a HDMI out, but I just wanted to migrate all the Nova stuff straight across to my new phone.
But I've customised Everything.
The backup-restore process tried to bring across as much as possible, but I'm beginning to think that, for my level of customisation, maybe I should see if I can edit the backup file by hand before I restore it (hear me out).
My problems with restore:
1. Nova Prime. The first app link the restore should launch is to prompt the user to reinstall Prime. Took me a while to realise why a bunch of things weren't working the way I used to enjoy.
2. Wallpaper. You could argue this is not a launcher setting, but even if it was an option to dump the image into the backup file (is it an archive?), it would make migration smoother. Not a biggie though, and the o/s should let you sort it yourself, providing you can locate the original image of course.
2. Apps not present. So you just restored the Nova backup to a new phone and a bunch of icons don't work. But wait: the ghost-icon launches straight to an app store search for them - excellent! Love this. Except for those 5% of apps that you hunted down APKs and side-loaded. Okay, this issue is a bit niche and probably belongs in a backup app that saves APKs rather than Nova. Fair enough. If new-Nova could talk to old-Nova, it'd be a cool migration feature though.
3. Icon pack stuff. I've replaced all my icons using an icon pack + no labels. Searching icon packs and selecting the perfect icon takes time, so I appreciate that the restored ghost icons "just work" once the matching app is installed. A bunch of icons didn't appear though: I think these were widget-like shortcuts, maybe? E.g. my new device's 'phone' app wasn't recognised as the same one as my old one, so all those contact shortcuts had to be remade (cue icon pack searching again). Using Nate Wren's "The Grid" (presuming I shouldn't just dump the Play URL here; search for it if you're interested), there are so many icons but no reliable way to find an exact icon (is there a hidden icon title name I can search for somehow?). Reinstating icons would be easier if custom icons could be more identifiable somehow. Could I read the backup file and/or tune it by hand, perhaps?
Might write a few more items later. Cheers for any ideas or explanations that might help.