Using Android Palette with Glide in Open Event Organizer Android App

Open Event Organizer is an Android Application for the Event Organizers and Entry Managers. The core feature of the App is to scan a QR code from the ticket to validate an attendee’s check in. Other features of the App are to display an overview of sales, ticket management and basic editing in the Event Details. Open Event API Server acts as a backend for this App. The App uses Navigation Drawer for navigation in the App. The side drawer contains menus, event name, event start date and event image in the header. Event name and date is shown just below the event image in a palette. For a better visibility Android Palette is used which extracts prominent colors from images. The App uses Glide to handle image loading hence GlidePalette library is used for palette generation which integrates Android Palette with Glide. I will be talking about the implementation of GlidePalette in the App in this blog.

The App uses Data Binding so the image URLs are directly passed to the XML views in the layouts and the image loading logic is implemented in the BindingAdapter class. The image loading code looks like:

GlideApp
   .with(imageView.getContext())
   .load(Uri.parse(url))
   ...
   .into(imageView);

 

So as to implement palette generation for event detail label, it has to be implemented with the event image loading. GlideApp takes request listener which implements methods on success and failure where palette can be generated using the bitmap loaded. With GlidePalette most of this part is covered in the library itself. It provides GlidePalette class which is a sub class of GlideApp request listener which is passed to the GlideApp using the method listener. In the App, BindingAdapter has a method named bindImageWithPalette which takes a view container, image url, a placeholder drawable and the ids of imageview and palette. The relevant code is:

@BindingAdapter(value = {"paletteImageUrl", "placeholder", "imageId", "paletteId"}, requireAll = false)
public static void bindImageWithPalette(View container, String url, Drawable drawable, int imageId, int paletteId) {
   ImageView imageView = (ImageView) container.findViewById(imageId);
   ViewGroup palette = (ViewGroup) container.findViewById(paletteId);

   if (TextUtils.isEmpty(url)) {
       if (drawable != null)
           imageView.setImageDrawable(drawable);
       palette.setBackgroundColor(container.getResources().getColor(R.color.grey_600));
       for (int i = 0; i < palette.getChildCount(); i++) {
           View child = palette.getChildAt(i);
           if (child instanceof TextView)
               ((TextView) child).setTextColor(Color.WHITE);
       }
       return;
   }
   GlidePalette<Drawable> glidePalette = GlidePalette.with(url)
       .use(GlidePalette.Profile.MUTED)
       .intoBackground(palette)
       .crossfade(true);

   for (int i = 0; i < palette.getChildCount(); i++) {
       View child = palette.getChildAt(i);
       if (child instanceof TextView)
           glidePalette
               .intoTextColor((TextView) child, GlidePalette.Swatch.TITLE_TEXT_COLOR);
   }
   setGlideImage(imageView, url, drawable, null, glidePalette);
}

 

The code is pretty obvious. The method checks passed URL for nullability. If null, it sets the placeholder drawable to the image view and default colors to the text views and the palette. The GlidePalette object is generated using the initializer method with which takes the image URL. The request is passed to the method setGlideImage which loads the image and passes the GlidePalette to the GlideApp as a listener. Accordingly, the palette is generated and the colors are set to the label and text views accordingly. The container view in the XML layout looks like:

<LinearLayout
   android:layout_width="match_parent"
   android:layout_height="wrap_content"
   android:orientation="vertical"
   app:paletteImageUrl="@{ event.largeImageUrl }"
   app:placeholder="@{ @drawable/header }"
   app:imageId="@{ R.id.image }"
   app:paletteId="@{ R.id.eventDetailPalette }">

 

Links:
1. Documentation for Glide Image Loading Library
2. GlidePalette Github Repository
3. Android Palette Official Documentation

Continue ReadingUsing Android Palette with Glide in Open Event Organizer Android App

Image Loading in Open Event Organizer Android App using Glide

Open Event Organizer is an Android App for the Event Organizers and Entry Managers. Open Event API Server acts as a backend for this App. The core feature of the App is to scan a QR code from the ticket to validate an attendee’s check in. Other features of the App are to display an overview of sales and ticket management. As per the functionality, the performance of the App is very important. The App should be functional even on a weak network. Talking about the performance, the image loading part in the app should be handled efficiently as it is not an essential part of the functionality of the App. Open Event Organizer uses Glide, a fast and efficient image loading library created by Sam Judd. I will be talking about its implementation in the App in this blog.

First part is the configuration of the glide in the App. The library provides a very easy way to do that. Your app needs to implement a class named AppGlideModule using annotations provided by the library and it generates a glide API which can be used in the app for all the image loading stuff. The AppGlideModule implementation in the Orga App looks like:

@GlideModule
public final class GlideAPI extends AppGlideModule {

   @Override
   public void registerComponents(Context context, Glide glide, Registry registry) {
       registry.replace(GlideUrl.class, InputStream.class, new OkHttpUrlLoader.Factory());
   }

   // TODO: Modify the options here according to the need
   @Override
   public void applyOptions(Context context, GlideBuilder builder) {
       int diskCacheSizeBytes = 1024 * 1024 * 10; // 10mb
       builder.setDiskCache(new InternalCacheDiskCacheFactory(context, diskCacheSizeBytes));
   }

   @Override
   public boolean isManifestParsingEnabled() {
       return false;
   }
}

 

This generates the API named GlideApp by default in the same package which can be used in the whole app. Just make sure to add the annotation @GlideModule to this implementation which is used to find this class in the app. The second part is using the generated API GlideApp in the app to load images using URLs. Orga App uses data binding for layouts. So all the image loading related code is placed at a single place in DataBinding class which is used by the layouts. The class has a method named setGlideImage which takes an image view, an image URL, a placeholder drawable and a transformation. The relevant code is:

private static void setGlideImage(ImageView imageView, String url, Drawable drawable, Transformation<Bitmap> transformation) {
       if (TextUtils.isEmpty(url)) {
           if (drawable != null)
               imageView.setImageDrawable(drawable);
           return;
       }
       GlideRequest<Drawable> request = GlideApp
           .with(imageView.getContext())
           .load(Uri.parse(url));

       if (drawable != null) {
           request
               .placeholder(drawable)
               .error(drawable);
       }
       request
           .centerCrop()
           .transition(withCrossFade())
           .transform(transformation == null ? new CenterCrop() : transformation)
           .into(imageView);
   }

 

The method is very clear. First, the URL is checked for nullability. If null, the drawable is set to the imageview and method returns. Usage of GlideApp is simpler. Pass the URL to the GlideApp using the method with which returns a GlideRequest which has operators to set other required options like transitions, transformations, placeholder etc. Lastly, pass the imageview using into operator. By default, Glide uses HttpURLConnection provided by android to load the image which can be changed to use Okhttp using the extension provided by the library. This is set in the AppGlideModule implementation in the registerComponents method.

Links:
1. Documentation for Glide, an Image Loading Library
2. Documentation for Okhttp, an HTTP client for Android and Java Applications

Continue ReadingImage Loading in Open Event Organizer Android App using Glide

Handle Large Size Images in Phimpme

Phimpme is an image app which provides custom camera, sharing features along with a well-featured gallery section. In gallery, it allows users to view local images. Right now we are using Glide to load images in the gallery, it is working fine for small size images it lags a bit when it comes to handling the high quality large images in the app. So in this post, I will explaining how to handle large size  images without lagging or without taking much time. To solve this problem I am using android universal image loader library which is very light when compared to glide.

Step – 1

First step is to include the dependency in the phimpme project and it can be done by the following way

dependencies {
compile 'com.nostra13.universalimageloader:universal-image-loader:1.9.4'
}

Step-2

After this create an Android universal image loader instance. We can create imageloader instance in our application class if we want to use the image loader globally.

ImageLoaderConfiguration config = new ImageLoaderConfiguration.Builder(
       this).memoryCacheExtraOptions(480, 800).defaultDisplayImageOptions(defaultOptions)
       .diskCacheExtraOptions(480, 800, null).threadPoolSize(3)
       .threadPriority(Thread.NORM_PRIORITY - 2)
       .tasksProcessingOrder(QueueProcessingType.FIFO)
       .denyCacheImageMultipleSizesInMemory()
       .memoryCache(new LruMemoryCache(MAXMEMONRY / 5))
       .diskCache(new UnlimitedDiskCache(cacheDir))
       .diskCacheFileNameGenerator(new HashCodeFileNameGenerator()) // default
       .imageDownloader(new BaseImageDownloader(this)) // default
       .imageDecoder(new BaseImageDecoder(false)) // default
       .defaultDisplayImageOptions(DisplayImageOptions.createSimple()).build();
 
 this.imageLoader = ImageLoader.getInstance();
 imageLoader.init(config);

Add the above code in the application class.


Step-3

Now our image loader instance is created now we can load an image easily. But to avoid the out of memory error and large image size error we can set many options to an image loader. In options we can set maximum memory allowed to image loader, maximum resolution and set particular architecture, it can be done in following ways.


Step-4

File cacheDir = com.nostra13.universalimageloader.utils.StorageUtils.getCacheDirectory(this);
 int MAXMEMONRY = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory());

To load an image using universal image loader just pass the URI of an image and to load write the below code.
Now the time is to load an image from local storage. We can load images from local storage, drawable, assets easily.

ImageLoader imageLoader = ((MyApplication)getApplicationContext()).getImageLoader();
 imageLoader.displayImage(imageUri, imageView);

This is how I handled large size image in Phimpme.

Large Image in Phimpme


References :

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Displaying an Animated Image in Splash Screen of Phimpme Android

A splash screen is the welcome page of the application. It gives the first impression of the application to the user. So, it is very important to make this page a better-looking one. In Phimpme Android, we had a normal page with a static image which is very common in all applications. So, in order to make it different from the most applications, we created an animation of the logo and added it to the splash screen.

As the splash screen is the first page/activity of the Phimpme Android application, most of the initialization functions are called in this activity. These initializations might take a little time giving us the time to display the logo animation.

Creating the animation of the Phimpme logo

For creating the animation of the Phimpme Android application’s logo, we used Adobe After Effects software. There are many free tools available on the web for creating the animation but due to the sophistic features present in After Effects, we used that software. We created the Phimpme Android application’s logo animation like any other normal video but with a lower frame rate. We used 12 FPS for the animation and it was fine as it was for a logo. Finally, we exported the animation as a transparent PNG formatted image sequence.

How to display the animation?

In Phimpme Android, we could’ve directly used the sequence of resultant images for displaying the animation. We could’ve done that by using a handler to change the image resource of an imageview. But this approach is very crude. So, we planned to create a GIF with the image sequence first and then display the GIF in the image view.

Creating a GIF from the image sequence

There are many tools on the web which create a GIF image from the given image sequence but most of the tools don’t support transparent images. This tool which we used to create the transparent GIF image supports both transparent and normal images. The frame rate and loop count can also be adjusted using this free tool. Below is the GIF image created using that tool.

Displaying the GIF in Phimpme

GIF image can be displayed in Phimpme Android application very easily using the famous Glide image caching and displaying library. But glide library doesn’t fulfill the need of the current scenario. Here, in Phimpme Android, we are displaying the GIF in the splash screen i.e. the next page should get displayed automatically. As we are showing an intro animation, the next activity/page should get opened only after the animation is completed. For achieving this we need a listener which triggers on the loop completion of the GIF image. Glide doesn’t provide any listener of this kind so we cannot Glide here.

There is a library named android-gif-drawable, which has the support for a GIF completion listener and many other methods. So, we used this for displaying the Phimpme Android application’s logo animation GIF image in the splash screen. When the GIF completed function gets triggered, we started the next activity if all the tasks which had to get completed in this activity itself are finished. Otherwise, we added a flag that the animation is done so that when the task gets completed, it just navigates to next page.

The way of the implementation described above is performed in Phimpme Android in the following manner.

First of all, we imported the library by adding it to the dependencies of build.gradle file.

compile 'pl.droidsonroids.gif:android-gif-drawable:1.2.7'

Then we added a normal imageview widget in the layout of the SplashScreen activity.

<ImageView
   android:id="@+id/imgLogo"
   android:layout_width="match_parent"
   android:layout_height="wrap_content"
   android:scaleType="fitCenter"
   android:layout_centerInParent="true"
   />

Finally, in the SplashScreen.java, we created a GifDrawable object using the GIF image of Phimpme Android logo animation, which we copied in the assets folder of the Phimpme application. We added a listener to the GifDrawble and added function calls inside that function. It is shown below.

GifDrawable gifDrawable = null;
try {
   gifDrawable = new GifDrawable( getAssets(), "splash_logo_anim.gif" );
} catch (IOException e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
}
if (gifDrawable != null) {
   gifDrawable.addAnimationListener(new AnimationListener() {
       @Override
       public void onAnimationCompleted(int loopNumber) {
           Log.d("splashscreen","Gif animation completed");
           if (can_be_finished && nextIntent != null){
               startActivity(nextIntent);
               finish();
           }else {
               can_be_finished = true;
           }
       }
   });
}
logoView.setImageDrawable(gifDrawable);

Resources:

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Getting Image location in the Phimpme Android’s Camera

The Phimpme Android app along with a decent gallery and accounts section comes with a nice camera section stuffed with all the features which a user requires for the day to day usage. It comes with an Auto mode for the best experience and also with a manual mode for the users who like to have some tweaks in the camera according to their own liking. Along with all these, it also has an option to get the accurate coordinates where the image was clicked. When we enable the location from the settings, it extracts the latitude and longitude of the image when it is being clicked and displays the visible region of the map at the top of the image info section as depicted in the screenshot below.

In this tutorial, I will be discussing how we have implemented the location functionality to fetch the location of the image in the Phimpme app.

Step 1

For getting the location from the device, the first step we need is to add the permission in the androidmanifest.xml file to access the GPS and the location services. This can be done using the following lines of code below.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION"/>

After this, we need to download install the google play services SDK to access the Google location API. Follow the official google developer’s guide on how to install the Google play services into the project from the resources section below.

Step 2

To get the last known location of the device at the time of clicking the picture we need to make use of the FusedLocationProviderClient class and need to create an object of this class and to initialise it in the onCreate method of the camera activity. This can be done using the following lines of code below:

private FusedLocationProviderClient mFusedLocationClient;
mFusedLocationClient = LocationServices.getFusedLocationProviderClient(this);

After we have created and initialised the object mFusedLocationClient, we need to call the getLastLocation method on it as soon as the user clicks on the take picture button in the camera. In this, we can also set onSuccessListener method which will return the Location object when it successfully extracts the present or the last known location of the device. This can be done using the following lines of code below:

mFusedLocationClient.getLastLocation()
       .addOnSuccessListener(this, new OnSuccessListener<Location>() {
           @Override
           public void onSuccess(Location location) {
               if (location != null) {
            //Get the latitude and longitude here
                  }

After this, we can successfully extract the latitude and the longitude of the device in the onSuccess method of the code snippet provided below and can store it in the shared preference to get the map view of the coordinates from a different activity of the application later on when the user tries to get the info of the images.

Step 3

After getting the latitude and longitude, we need to get the image view of the visible region of the map. We can make use of the Glide library to fetch the visible map area from the url which contains our location values and to set it to the image view.

The url of the visible map can be generated using the following lines of code.

String.format(Locale.US, getUrl(value), location.getLatitude(), location.getLongitude());

This is how we have added the functionality to fetch the coordinates of the device at the time of clicking the image and to display the map in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android GitHub repository.

Resources

  1. Google Developer’s : Location services guide – https://developer.android.com/training/location/retrieve-current.html
  2. Google Developer’s : Google play services SDK guide – https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/update.html#channels
  3. GitHub : Open camera Source Code –  https://github.com/almalence/OpenCamera
  4. GitHub : Phimpme Android – https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/
  5. GitHub : Glide library – https://github.com/bumptech/glide

 

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Sorting Photos in Phimpme Android

The Phimpme Android application features a fully fledged gallery interface with an option to switch to all photos mode, albums mode and to sort photos according to various sort actions. Sorting photos via various options helps the user to get to the desired photo immediately without having to scroll down till the end in case it is the last photo in the list generated automatically by scanning the phone for images using the Android’s mediaStore class. In this tutorial, I will be discussing how we achieved the sorting option in the Phimpme application with the help of some code snippets.

To sort the all photos list, first of all we need a list of all the photos by scanning the phone using the media scanner class via the code snippet provided below:

uri = android.provider.MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI;
      String[] projection = {MediaStore.MediaColumns.DATA};
      cursor = activity.getContentResolver().query(uri, projection, null, null, null);

In the above code we are using a cursor to point to each photos and then we are extracting the path of the images and storing it in a list using a while loop. After we generate the list of path of all the images, we have to convert the into a list of media using the file path using the code below:

for (String path : listOfAllImages) {
          list.add(new Media(new File(path)));
      }
      return list;
  }

After generating the list of all images we can sort the photos using the Android’s collection class. In Phimpme Android we provide the option to sort photos in different categories namely:

  1. Name Sort action
  2. Date Sort action
  3. Size Sort action
  4. Numeric Sort action

As sorting is somewhat heavy task so doing this in the main thread will result in freezing UI of the application so we have to put this into an AsyncTask with a progress dialog to sort the photos. After putting the above four options in the menu options. We can define an Asynctask to load the images and in the onPreExecute method of the AsyncTask, we are displaying the progress dialog to the user to depict that the sorting process is going on as depicted in the code snippet below

AlertDialog.Builder progressDialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(LFMainActivity.this, getDialogStyle());
dialog = AlertDialogsHelper.getProgressDialog(LFMainActivity.this, progressDialog,
      getString(R.string.loading_numeric), all_photos ? getString(R.string.loading_numeric_all) : getAlbum().getName());
dialog.show();

In the doInBackgroundMethod of the AsyncTask, we are sorting the list of all photos using the Android’s collection class and using the static sort method defined in that class which takes the list of all the media files as a parameter and the MediaComparator which takes the sorting mode as the first parameter and the sorting order as the second. The sorting order decides whether to arrange the list in ascending or in descending order.

getAlbum().setDefaultSortingMode(getApplicationContext(), NUMERIC);
Collections.sort(listAll, MediaComparators.getComparator(getAlbum().settings.getSortingMode(), getAlbum().settings.getSortingOrder()));

After sorting, we have to update the data set to reflect the changes of the list in the UI. This we are doing in the onPostExecute method of the AsyncTask after dismissing the progress Dialog to avoid the window leaks in the application. You can read more about the window leaks in Android due to progressdialog here.

dialog.dismiss();
mediaAdapter.swapDataSet(listAll);

To get the full source code, you can refer the Phimpme Android repository listed in the resources below.

Resources

  1. Android developer guide to mediastore class: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/MediaStore.html
  2. GitHub LeafPic repository: https://github.com/HoraApps/LeafPic
  3. Stackoverflow – Preventing window leaks in Android: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6614692/progressdialog-how-to-prevent-leaked-window
  4. Blog – Sorting lists in Android: http://www.worldbestlearningcenter.com/tips/Android-sort-ListView.htm
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