[Sugar-devel] Android ActionBar and Activity Toolbar

[Andrew McMillan]

On Mon, 2013-07-29 at 14:42 -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> I wonder if removing the stop button is a good idea.
> 
> 
> Most android applications are not proposed to create,
> then can be opened for ever. If you open/close a document,
> is opened/closed inside the application, is different than as we work
> in sugar.
>  
> We use different instances of the activity, mapped to the
> text/draw/game created.
> 
> 
> How should that be implemented on android?

Android will only ever have one instance of an application active at any
time.  If that application is active with multiple documents (e.g. such
as in the case of a web browser with multiple pages open) users probably
be most familiar with a tabbed approach - perhaps with the actual tabs
hidden until some gesture, since screen real estate is often at a
premium.

Of course for most activities (i.e. the ones that require user
interaction for things to happen) the non-foreground 'tabs' are probably
only images of what the screen looked like when it got suspended.

The method of "stopping" an activity on Android is usually to press the
"Back" button to exit the app.  This button will always be available to
the user, though apps can intercept it (often with good reason).   The
secondary exit method is to use the "Home" button, which apps cannot
override, but which will (by default) "pause" the app, rather than
"finish" it, so you can access it again in recent tasks (until Android
decides it wants the resources back and kills it anyway) and it will
start where it left off.

However the best Android apps really only use this behaviour as an
optimisation, and save the full application state themselves OnPause so
it can be restored correctly even if Android does kill it off.

Regards,
					Andrew.

-- 
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andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                         +64 (2) 7233 2426
                     Slow day.  Practice crawling.
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