Creating a landing page similar to twitter app and others

Question

I am wanting to make a reusable 'landing page' activity similar to like the activity when you first launch the official twitter app, facebook, or google io app, etc. Reusable is really the key here I would like for the activity to dynamically populate its gridview with the other activities in the application.

Is it possible to parse through the android manifest file to find my other activities? If so is it also possible to add my own xml attributes to the manifest file to distinguish which activities should show up in the gridview?

Or, is there some other way to find all existing activity classes in the package? Is there a way in java to look for any Class in a package that implements a particular interface?

edit: here is a screen shot as per request

Answer 1

I guess what you want is a dashboard. For ideas on how to implement it you could look at the source code of the Google I/O android app, more specifically at the activity_home.xml.

Parsing the manifest.xml could be an idea although I'm not sure whether you're able to access it. Honestly, being on a mobile where you want to use as little resources as possible I'd suggest you to reference your items hardcoded in the xml file, just as they did it on the Google I/O app.

The reason is that you probably want to promote just the most important activities of your app, not the detail views of a list or some custom popup alert which is also registered in the manifest and would therefore be difficult to distinguish from others.

Answer 2

How many activities do you have to put on the dashboard? Will the user ever be able to promote inactive activities because they want them? I think you have to consider those factors as well. Otherwise, you would weight the ones you want to show up first (different ways to do this) and then let them trickle into the dashboard.

As far as how to display which where, if you're using HTML/CSS then you could use a set width and a float model. Otherwise, just iterate through the list of promoted activities. I've done both in HTML/CSS dashboards I've done. It's just according to what your parameters are.

It's relatively easy to build a list in memory and loop from 1 to 6 assigning values to each of 6 locations on screen. Making them dynamically sized could be tricky.

Looking for more info to help you out, but not sure exactly how you're having issues. Unless you have something directly patentable, I would suggest showing code and what you're struggling with ...

Answer 3

Is it possible to parse through the android manifest file to find my other activities?

No, but you can iterate over your activities via PackageManager and getPackageInfo().

If so is it also possible to add my own xml attributes to the manifest file to distinguish which activities should show up in the gridview?

You should be able to use a <meta-data> element to point to an XML resource file that contains your extra data, just like app widgets and searching do. Use loadXmlMetaData() to access the contents.

That being said, I agree with Juri -- you're using a Buick to swat a fly here. Having a reusable dashboard activity is great -- working out the details of one is on my 18,000-item to-do list. Having one that tries to dynamically populate itself seems overkill.