TUTORIAL 33
A Restaurant In Your Own
Home
In this tutorial, we will create an "app widget", the term Android uses for
interactive elements a user can add to their home screen. In particular, we
will create an app widget that shows a random restaurant out of the
LunchList database.
Step-By-Step Instructions........................................................................
First, you need to have completed the previous LunchList tutorial. If you are
starting the tutorials here, or if you wish to not use your existing work, you
can download a ZIP file with all of the tutorial results, and you can copy the
31-Search edition of LunchList to use as a starting point.
Step #1: Find An App Widget Background and Icon
We are going to need a background to use for our app widget, so its
contents do not seem to float in empty space in the home screen. Ideally,
this background is resizeable, so we have a choice of using an XML-defined
drawable resource, or a nine-patch PNG.
If you examine the 33-AppWidget project in the book's source code
repository, you will see that there is a widget_frame.9.png file in
LunchList/res/drawable. That nine-patch image works nicely for your app