So far so good but I would like you to think a bit further. So we have these LiveFolders that
- Allow applications to produce items of interest
- And these items of interest, when "clicked", activate other actions.
Sadly, exploiting this possibility is not easy now. The only LiveFolder client I am aware of is Launcher itself and aggregating/manipulating feeds is not easy. I am attempting to do just that in this blog post. I will show you how to create a LiveFolder of non-starred contacts of two existing LiveFolders: All contacts and starred contacts.
Click here to download the live folder aggregating application.
Did you know that you can star contacts? I did not but there is a LiveFolder for starred contacts.
Install the application. Now if you select the Add menu on the Launcher main screen, select Folders, you will see the Nonstarred folder. Add that folder and it appears on the home screen. If you open that folder, you will see all non-starred contacts in it. If you click any such contact, the Contact application is opened and the contact is displayed.
We generate the non-starred LiveFolder from to other LiveFolders. The application has two parts, an Activity that is invoked by Launcher to discover the LiveFolder. This is the part of the application that itself discovers other LiveFolders to retrieve the URIs of the two source LiveFolders. These URIs are then passed to the ContentProvider that aggregates the two source LiveFolders into a third one. The interesting part is the fake Cursor we return to the LiveFolder client which really accesses in-memory data and not SQLite database as it is usual with Android applications.
As a bonus track, I share with you a simple LiveFolder client that helps you to discover other LiveFolders.
Click here to download the live folder client application.
So far so good but I am not satisfied. In order to achieve the ease of manipulating RSS feeds in web programming, more automation is necessary. I intend to do it later, after I experimented with another idea.
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