Comments on: Accessing the Dialer

By: Ollie

Ollie — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:04:18 +0000

Just wanted to say thx for posting this. I’m currently taking a Mobile Programming course which is very intense and this code helped me understand intents better. I’m a novice(only 3 days programming for android) and this provided some great insight. Thx alot.

By: PatG

PatG — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:49:13 +0000

I tried its fantastic its work cool, my project need a SMS to send from mobile , how can I call that through any fuction.
Is there any way we can call the SMS module like a call module , Please help budy

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:09:21 +0000

@Ahnfelt I agree! Plus adding a bunch of redundant methods makes the Android class files larger, which is bad for mobile platforms.

By: Ahnfelt

Ahnfelt — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:45:27 +0000

I don’t think shortening that line for some intents is a good idea, as it will create two ways to do things without providing much benefit (a little less verbosity). I think in such cases it’s better to get accustomed to the “generic” way of doing things, so that you don’t have to learn yet-another-idiom when you finally need to call something that isn’t built into Android.

By: Mark Volkmann

Mark Volkmann — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:24:52 +0000

It seems like dialing and maybe many other activities will be used commonly enough in Android applications that there should be convenience methods for them in the library.

For example, maybe Activity.dial(”6365551212″) should be a static method that does the following:

startActivity(new Intent(ACTION_DIAL, Uri.parse(”tel:6365551212″));

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:42:06 +0000

@Mario R is found in every Android program. It is generated from XML files. So you edit a String or layout in XML, then R.java is automatically updated. Then in your code, you get efficiency, compiler checks, and code completion because your code always deals with the generated constants in R.java.

By: Mario Aquino

Mario Aquino — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:15:21 +0000

“How easy it is” is a phrase that can be used to demonstrate difficulty: “This is how easy it is to write a mobile platform operating system… (followed by 400k lines of source code)”.

What’s that ‘R’ business (R.id.dial_button)?

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:57:13 +0000

@bowerbird I considered just showing this:

startActivity(new Intent(ACTION_DIAL, Uri.parse(”tel:6365551212″));

But then the example would not show any context, which isn’t all that helpful.

By: Eric Danker

Eric Danker — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:30:27 +0000

@bowerbird:

While I would agree that Java could be a bit more concise, it’s not a fair argument to make that all of the above code could be condensed into one line.

The code above does more than just dial: It creates the view, sets up the button listener and executes the code that does the actual dialing.

Could it be reduced from 18 lines of Java to something more straightforward in another language?…sure. But one line is not realistic in any language.

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:07:09 +0000

you low-level guys crack me up:

> This is how easy it is

followed by 30 lines of gibberish.

no, sir, this is what _easy_ looks like:

> dial 636-555-1212

1 line, crystal-clear. high-level rocks.

-bowerbird