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Read more about the article Uploading Images to Box Storage from the Phimpme Application

Uploading Images to Box Storage from the Phimpme Application

The Phimpme Android application along with many other cloud storage applications integrated like Dropbox, Imgur, Pinterest has the option to upload the image to the Box storage without having to install any other applications on the device. From the Phimpme app, the user can click the photo, edit it, view any image from the gallery and then can upload multiple images to many storage services or social media without any hassle. In this tutorial, I will be discussing how we achieved the functionality to upload the images on the Box storage. Step 1: To integrate Box storage to the application, the first thing we need to do is create an application from the Box developers console and get the CLIENT_ID and the CLIENT_SECRET. To do this: Go to the Box developer page and log in. Create a new application from the app console. It will now give options to select what kind of application are you using. Select the option partner integration to get the image upload functionality to all the users. Give a name to your application and finally click the create application button. After this, you will be taken to the screen similar to the below screenshot from where you can copy the CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET to be used later on. Step 2: Now coming to the Android part, to get the image upload functionality to the box storage, we need to make use of the Android SDK provided by Box to achieve the uploading functionality easily. To add the SDK to the Android project from Gradle, copy the following line of Gradle script which will download and install the SDK from the maven repository. maven{ url "https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.box/box-android-sdk" } compile group: 'com.box', name: 'box-android-sdk', version: '4.0.8' Now after adding the SDK, rebuild the project. Step 3: After this, to upload the file on the box storage, we need to login to the Box account to get the access token and the user name to store it in Realm database. For this, first we have to configure the Box client. This can be done using the following line of code. BoxConfig.CLIENT_ID = BOX_CLIENT_ID; BoxConfig.CLIENT_SECRET = BOX_CLIENT_SECRET; Replace the BOX_CLIENT_ID and BOX_CLIENT_SECRET in the above code with the key received by following the step 1. After configuring the Box API client, we can authenticate the user using the sessionBox object by following lines of code. sessionBox = new BoxSession(AccountActivity.this); sessionBox.authenticate(); After the authentication, we have to get the user name and the access token of the user using the authenticated session box. account.setUsername(sessionBox.getUser().getName()); account.setToken(String.valueOf(accessToken)); After authenticating the user, we can upload the photos directly to the Box storage from the Share Activity in the Phimpme Android application. For this, we have to create a new Asynchronous task in android which will do the network operations in the background to avoid the Network on main thread exception. After this, we can make use of the Box file API to upload the photos to the Box storage and call the function getUploadRequest…

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Read more about the article Adding Manual ISO Controls in Phimpme Android

Adding Manual ISO Controls in Phimpme Android

The Phimpme Android application comes with a well-featured camera to take high resolution photographs. It features an auto mode in the camera as well as a manual mode for users who likes to customise the camera experience according to their own liking. It provides the users to select from the range of ISO values supported by their devices with a manual mode to enhance the images in case the auto mode fails on certain circumstances such as low lighting conditions. In this tutorial, I will be discussing how we achieved this in Phimpme Android with some code snippets and screenshots. To provide the users with an option to select from the range of ISO values, the first thing we need to do is scan the phone for all the supported values of ISO and store it in an arraylist to be used to display later on. This can be done by the snippet provided below: String iso_values = parameters.get("iso-values"); if( iso_values == null ) {  iso_values = parameters.get("iso-mode-values"); // Galaxy Nexus  if( iso_values == null ) {     iso_values = parameters.get("iso-speed-values"); // Micromax A101     if( iso_values == null )        iso_values = parameters.get("nv-picture-iso-values"); // LG dual P990 Every device supports a different set of keyword to provide the list of ISO values. Hence, we have tried to add every possible keywords to extract the values. Some of the keywords used above covers almost 90% of the android devices and gets the set of ISO values successfully. For the devices which supports the ISO values but doesn’t provide the keyword to extract the ISO values, we can provide the standard list of ISO values manually using the code snippet provided below: values.add("200"); values.add("400"); values.add("800"); values.add("1600"); After extracting the set of ISO values, we need to create a list to display to the user and upon selection of the particular ISO value as depicted in the Phimpme camera screenshot below Now to set the selected ISO value, we first need to get the ISO key to set the ISO values as depicted in the code snippet provided below: if( parameters.get(iso_key) == null ) {  iso_key = "iso-speed"; // Micromax A101  if( parameters.get(iso_key) == null ) {     iso_key = "nv-picture-iso"; // LG dual P990     if( parameters.get(iso_key) == null ) {        if ( Build.MODEL.contains("Z00") )           iso_key = "iso"; // Asus Zenfone 2 Z00A and Z008 Getting the key to set the ISO values is similar to getting the key to extract the ISO values from the device. The above listed ISO keys to set the values covers most of the devices. Now after we have got the ISO key, we need to change the camera parameter to reflect the selected change. parameters.set(iso_key, supported_values.selected_value); setCameraParameters(parameters); To get the full source code on how to set the ISO values manually, please refer to the Phimpme Android repository. Resources Stackoverflow - Keywords to extract ISO values from the device: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2978095/android-camera-api-iso-setting Open camera Android source code: https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/code/ci/master/tree/ Blog - Learn more about ISO values in photography: https://photographylife.com/what-is-iso-in-photography

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Read more about the article Sorting Photos in Phimpme Android

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: Name Sort action Date Sort action Size Sort action 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…

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Read more about the article Implementing Stickers on an Image in Phimpme

Implementing Stickers on an Image in Phimpme

One feature we implemented in the Phimpme photo editing application is to enable users to add stickers on top of the image. In this blog, I will explain how stickers are implemented in Phimpme. Features of Stickers Users can resize the stickers. Users can place the stickers wherever in the canvas. Step.1-Storing the Stickers in assets folder In Phimpme I stored the stickers in the assets folder. To distribute the stickers in different categories I made different folders according to the categories namely type1, type2, type3, type4 and so on.   Displaying stickers We used onBindViewHolder to Display the stickers in different categories like: Facial Express Objects Comments Wishes Emojis Hashtags String path will get the position of the particular type of stickers collection. This type is then loaded to the ImageLoader with the specific icon associating with the types.    @Override public void onBindViewHolder(mRecyclerAdapter.mViewHolder holder, final int position) {   String path = pathList.get(position);       ImageLoader.getInstance().displayImage("assets://" + path,holder.icon, imageOption);       holder.itemView.setTag(path);       holder.title.setText("");   int size = (int) getActivity().getResources().getDimension(R.dimen.icon_item_image_size_filter_preview);   LinearLayout.LayoutParams layoutParams = new LinearLayout.LayoutParams(size,size);   holder.icon.setLayoutParams(layoutParams);   holder.itemView.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {       @Override       public void onClick(View v) {           String data = (String) v.getTag();           selectedStickerItem(data);       }   }); } Step.2- Applying a sticker on the image When a particular sticker is selected selectedStickerItem() function is called.This function calls StickerView class to add the Bitmap on the image. It sends the path of the sticker as a parameter.   public void selectedStickerItem(String path) {   mStickerView.addBitImage(getImageFromAssetsFile(path)); } In StickerView class the image of the sticker is then converted into a Bitmap. It creates an object(item) of StickerItem class. This object calls the init function, which handles the size of the sticker and the placement of the sticker on the image. public void addBitImage(final Bitmap addBit) {   StickerItem item = new StickerItem(this.getContext());   item.init(addBit, this);   if (currentItem != null) {       currentItem.isDrawHelpTool = false;   }   bank.put(++imageCount, item);   this.invalidate(); } Step.3-Resizing the Sticker in the canvas A bitmap or any image has two axes namely x and y. We can resize the image using matrix calculation. float c_x = dstRect.centerX(); float c_y = dstRect.centerY(); float x = this.detectRotateRect.centerX(); float y = this.detectRotateRect.centerY(); We then calculate the source length and the current length: float srcLen = (float) Math.sqrt(xa * xa + ya * ya); float curLen = (float) Math.sqrt(xb * xb + yb * yb); Then we calculate the scale. This is required to calculate the zoom ratio. float scale = curLen / srcLen; We need to rescale the bitmap. That is if the user rotates the sticker or zoom in or zoom out the sticker. A helpbox surrounds the stickers showing the actual size of the sticker. This helpbox which is rectangular shape helps in resizing the sticker. RectUtil.scaleRect(this.dstRect, scale);// Zoom destination rectangle // Recalculate the Toolbox coordinates helpBox.set(dstRect); updateHelpBoxRect();// Recalculate rotateRect.offsetTo(helpBox.right - BUTTON_WIDTH, helpBox.bottom       - BUTTON_WIDTH); deleteRect.offsetTo(helpBox.left - BUTTON_WIDTH, helpBox.top       - BUTTON_WIDTH); detectRotateRect.offsetTo(helpBox.right - BUTTON_WIDTH, helpBox.bottom       - BUTTON_WIDTH); detectDeleteRect.offsetTo(helpBox.left - BUTTON_WIDTH, helpBox.top       - BUTTON_WIDTH); Conclusion In Phimpme a user can now place the sticker on top of the image. Resize the sticker, that is Zoom…

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Read more about the article Share Images on Pinterest from Phimpme Android Application

Share Images on Pinterest from Phimpme Android Application

After successfully establishing Pinterest authentication in Phimpme our next goal was to share the image on the Pinterest website directly from Phimpme, without using any native Android application. Adding Pinterest Sharing option in Sharing Activity in Phimpme To add various sharing options in Sharing Activity in the Phimpme project, I have applied a ScrollView for the list of the different sharing options which include: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Imgur, Flickr and Instagram. All the App icons with the name are arranged in a TableLayout in the activity_share.xml file. Table rows consist of two columns. In this way, it is easier to add more app icons for future development. <ScrollView   android:layout_width="wrap_content"   android:layout_height="@dimen/scroll_view_height"   android:layout_above="@+id/share_done"   android:id="@+id/bottom_view">   <LinearLayout       android:layout_width="wrap_content"       android:layout_height="wrap_content"       android:orientation="vertical">       <TableLayout Adding Pinterest app icon on the icons_drawable array. This array is then used to inflate the icon on the list view. private int[] icons_drawables = {R.drawable.ic_facebook_black, R.drawable.ic_twitter_black,R.drawable.ic_instagram_black, R.drawable.ic_wordpress_black, R.drawable.ic_pinterest_black); Adding Pinterest text on the titles_text array. This array is then used to inflate the names of the various sharing activity. private int[] titles_text = {R.string.facebook, R.string.twitter, R.string.instagram,       R.string.wordpress, R.string.pinterest); Prerequisites to share Image on Pinterest To share an Image on Pinterest a user has to add a caption and Board ID. Our first milestone was to get the input of the Board ID  by the user. I have achieved this by taking the input in a Dialog Box. When the user clicks on the Pinterest option, a dialog box pops and then the user can add their Board ID. private void openPinterestDialogBox() {   AlertDialog.Builder captionDialogBuilder = new AlertDialog.Builder(SharingActivity.this, getDialogStyle());   final EditText captionEditText = getCaptionDialog(this, captionDialogBuilder);   captionEditText.setHint(R.string.hint_boardID);   captionDialogBuilder.setNegativeButton(getString(R.string.cancel).toUpperCase(), null);   captionDialogBuilder.setPositiveButton(getString(R.string.post_action).toUpperCase(), new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {       @Override       public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {           //This should be empty it will be overwrite later           //to avoid dismiss of the dialog on the wrong password       }   });   final AlertDialog passwordDialog = captionDialogBuilder.create();   passwordDialog.show();   passwordDialog.getButton(AlertDialog.BUTTON_POSITIVE).setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {       @Override       public void onClick(View v) {           String captionText = captionEditText.getText().toString();           boardID =captionText;           shareToPinterest(boardID);           passwordDialog.dismiss();       }   }); } A user can fetch the Board ID by following the steps: Copy the Board URL from the Pinterest main page. Paste the URL in the dialog box of the website: https://www.nutt.net/how-do-i-get-pinterest-board-id/ Copy the Board ID from the website and then past it in the AlertDialog Box. Board ID is necessary because it specifies where the image needs to be posted. Creating custom post function for Phimpme The image is posted using a function in PDKClient class. PDKClient is found in the PDK module which we get after importing Pinterest SDK. Every image is posted on Pinterest is called a Pin. So we will call createPin function. I have made my custom createPin function so that it also accepts Bitmaps as a parameter. In the Pinterest SDK it only accepts image URL to share, The image should already be on the internet to be shared. For this reason, we to add a custom create Pin function to accept Bitmaps as an option. public void createPin(String note, String boardId, Bitmap image, String link, PDKCallback callback) {   if (Utils.isEmpty(note)…

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Read more about the article Integration of Flickr in Phimpme Android

Integration of Flickr in Phimpme Android

Flickr is very widely used photo sharing website. So, we added a functionality in Phimpme Android to share the image to Flickr. Using this feature, the user can upload a picture to Flickr, without leaving the application with a single click. The way how we implemented this Flickr in our Phimpme Android application is shown below. Setting up Flickr API Flickr provides only an official web API. So we used the flickrj-android library built using the official Flickr API. First of all, we created an application in Flickr App Garden and requested API tokens from here. We noted down the resultant API key and secret key. These keys are necessary for authenticating Flickr in the application. Steps for Authentication Establishing the authentication with Flickr requires the following steps as per the official documentation. Getting a request token Getting User Authorization Exchanging the Request Token for an Access Token Use the Access Token with up.flickr.com/services/upload/ to upload pictures. Authorizing the user of Flickr in Phimpme As shown in the above picture, a request token has to be generated. Flickrj SDK provides it for us using Flickr object which further is created using the API key and Secret key. This request token is used for directing the user to a page for manually authorizing the Phimpme application to share the picture to his/her Flickr account. In Phimpme Android application, we created the Flickr object as shown below. Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST()); OAuthToken oauthToken = f.getOAuthInterface().getRequestToken(     OAUTH_CALLBACK_URI.toString()); saveTokenSecrent(oauthToken.getOauthTokenSecret()); URL oauthUrl = f.getOAuthInterface().buildAuthenticationUrl(     Permission.WRITE, oauthToken); Getting Access Token After the manual authorization of the application, Flickr returns the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These have to used for making another request to Flickr for getting the “Access Token” which gives us the access to upload the picture to Flickr account. For implementing this, intent data is collected when the application reopens after manual authorization. This data contains the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These are passed to get Access Token from functions present Flickrj library. In Phimpme Android, we implemented this in following way. Uri uri = intent.getData(); String query = uri.getQuery(); String[] data = query.split("&"); if (data != null && data.length == 2) {  String oauthToken = data[0].substring(data[0].indexOf("=") + 1);  String oauthVerifier = data[1].substring(data[1].indexOf("=") + 1);  OAuth oauth = getOAuthToken();  if (oauth != null && oauth.getToken() != null && oauth.getToken().getOauthTokenSecret() != null) { Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());  OAuthInterface oauthApi = null;  if (f != null) {     oauthApi = f.getOAuthInterface();     return oauthApi.getAccessToken(oauthToken, oauthTokenSecret,verifier);}  } } Uploading Image to Flickr As we got the Access Token, we used that for creating new Flickr Object. The upload function present in the API requires three arguments - a file name, input stream and its metadata. The input stream is generated using the ContentResolver present in the Android. The code showing how we implemented uploading to Flickr is shown below. Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST()); RequestContext requestContext = RequestContext.getRequestContext(); OAuth auth = new OAuth(); auth.setToken(new OAuthToken(token, secret));…

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Read more about the article Using OpenCV for Native Image Processing in Phimpme Android

Using OpenCV for Native Image Processing in Phimpme Android

OpenCV is very widely used open-source image processing library. After the integration of OpenCV Android SDK in the Phimpme Android application, the image processing functions can be written in Java part or native part. Taking runtime of the functions into consideration we used native functions for image processing in the Phimpme application. We didn’t have the whole application written in native code, we just called the native functions on the Java OpenCV Mat object. Mat is short for the matrix in OpenCV. The image on which we perform image processing operations in the Phimpme Android application is stored as Mat object in OpenCV. Creating a Java OpenCV Mat object Mat object of OpenCV is same whether we use it in Java or C++. We have common OpenCV object in Phimpme for accessing from both Java part and native part of the application. We have a Java bitmap object on which we have to perform image processing operations using OpenCV. For doing that we need to create a Java Mat object and pass its address to native. Mat object of OpenCV can be created using the bitmap2Mat() function present in the OpenCV library. The implementation is shown below. Mat inputMat = new Mat(bitmap.getWidth(), bitmap.getHeight(), CvType.CV_8UC3); Utils.bitmapToMat(bitmap, inputMat); “bitmap” is the Java bitmap object which has the image to be processed. The third argument in the Mat function indicates that the Mat should be of type 8UC3 i.e. three color channels with 8-bit depth. With the second line above, the bitmap gets saved as the OpenCV Mat object. Passing Mat Object to Native We have the OpenCV Mat object in the memory. If we pass the whole object again to native, the same object gets copied from one memory location to another. In Phimpme application, instead of doing all that we can just get the memory location of the current OpenCV Mat object and pass it to native. As we have the address of the Mat, we can access it directly from native functions. Implementation of this is shown below. Native Function Definition: private static native void nativeApplyFilter(long inpAddr); Native Function call: nativeApplyFilter(inputMat.getNativeObjAddr()); Getting Native Mat Object to Java We can follow the similar steps for getting the Mat from the native part after processing. In the Java part of Phimpme, we created an OpenCV Mat object before we pass the inputMat OpenCV Mat object to native for processing. So we have inputMat and outputMat in the memory before we send them to native. We get the memory locations of both the Mat objects and pass those addresses to native part. After the processing is done, the data gets written to the same memory location and can be accessed in Java. The above functions can be modified and rewritten for this purpose as shown below Native Function Definition: private static native void nativeApplyFilter(long inpAddr, long outAddr ); Native Function call: nativeApplyFilter(inputMat.getNativeObjAddr(),outputMat.getNativeObjAddr()); inputMat.release(); if (outputMat !=null){   Bitmap outbit = Bitmap.createBitmap(bitmap.getWidth(),bitmap.getHeight(),bitmap.getConfig());   Utils.matToBitmap(outputMat,outbit);   outputMat.release();   return outbit; } Native operations on Mat using OpenCV The JNI…

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Read more about the article Integrating OpenCV for Native Image Processing in Phimpme Android

Integrating OpenCV for Native Image Processing in Phimpme Android

OpenCV is an open source computer vision library written in C and C++. It has many pre-built image processing functions for all kinds of purposes. The filters and image enhancing functions which we implemented in Phimpme are not fully optimized. So we decided to integrate the Android SDK of OpenCV in the Phimpme Android application. For integrating OpenCV in the application, the files inside the OpenCV Android SDK have to be properly placed inside the project. The build and make files of the project have to be configured correspondingly. Here, in this post, I will mention how we fully integrated OpenCV Android SDK and configured the Phimpme project. Setting Up First, we downloaded the OpenCV-Android-SDK zip from the official release page here. Now we extracted the OpenCV-Android-SDK.zip file to navigated to SDK folder to see that there are three folders inside it. etc, Java and native. All the build files are present inside the native directory and are necessarily copied to our project. The java directory inside the SDK folder is an external gradle module which has to imported and added as a dependency to our project. So we copied all the files from jni directory of SDK folder inside OpenCV-Android-SDK to jni directory of the Phimpme project inside main. Similarly copied the 3rdparty directory into the main folder of the Phimpme project. Libs folder should also be copied into the main folder of the Phimpme but it has to be renamed to jniLibs. The project structure can be viewed in the below image. Adding Module to Project Now we headed to Android Studio and right clicked on the app in the project view, to add a new module. In that window select import Gradle project and browse to the java folder inside the SDK folder of OpenCV-Android-SDK as shown in figures. Now we opened the build.gradle file of app level (not project level) and added the following line as a dependency.  compile project(':openCVLibrary320') Now open the build.gradle inside the openCVLibrary320 external module and change the platform tools version and  SDK versions. Configuring Native Build Files We removed all files related to cmake be we use ndk-build to compile native code. After removing the cmake files, added following lines in the application.mk file APP_OPTIM := release APP_ABI := all APP_STL := gnustl_static APP_CPPFLAGS := -frtti -fexceptions APP_PLATFORM := android-25 Now we further added the following lines to the top of Android.mk file OPENCV_INSTALL_MODULES:=on OPENCV_CAMERA_MODULES:=on OPENCV_LIB_TYPE := STATIC include $(LOCAL_PATH)/OpenCV.mk The third line here is a flag indicating that the library has to be static and there is no need for external OpenCVLoader application. Finally, find this line OPENCV_LIBS_DIR:=$(OPENCV_THIS_DIR)/../libs/$(OPENCV_TARGET_ARCH_ABI) in OpenCV.mk file and replace it with OPENCV_LIBS_DIR:=$(OPENCV_THIS_DIR)/../jniLibs/$(OPENCV_TARGET_ARCH_ABI) And finally, add the following lines to java part. So that the OpenCV is initialized and linked to application static {   if (!OpenCVLoader.initDebug()) {       Log.e( TAG + " - Error", "Unable to load OpenCV");   } else {       System.loadLibrary("modulename_present_in_Android.mk");   } } With this, the integration of OpenCV and the configuration of the project is completed.…

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Read more about the article Passing Java Bitmap Object to Native for Image Processing and Getting it back in Phimpme Android

Passing Java Bitmap Object to Native for Image Processing and Getting it back in Phimpme Android

To perform any image processing operations on an image, we must have an image object in native part like we have a Bitmap object in Java. We cannot just pass the image bitmap object directly as an argument to native function because ‘Bitmap’ is a java object and C/C++ cannot interpret it directly as an image. So, here I’ll discuss a method to send java Bitmap object to Native part for performing image processing operations on it, which we implemented in the image editor of Phimpme Android Image Application. C/C++ cannot interpret java bitmap object. So, we have to find the pixels of the java bitmap object and send them to native part to create a native bitmap over there. In Phimpme, we used a “struct” data structure in C to represent native bitmap. An image has three color channels red, green, blue. We consider alpha channel(transparency) for an argb8888 type image. But in Phimpme, we considered only three channels as it is enough to manipulate these channels to implement the edit functions, which we used in the Editor of Phimpme. We defined a struct, type-defined as NativeBitmap with attributes corresponding to all the three channels. We defined this in the nativebitmap.h header file in the jni/ folder of Phimpme so that we can include this header file in c files in which we needed to use a NativeBitmap struct. #ifndef NATIVEBITMAP #define NATIVEBITMAP #endif typedef struct { unsigned int width; unsigned int height; unsigned int redWidth; unsigned int redHeight; unsigned int greenWidth; unsigned int greenHeight; unsigned int blueWidth; unsigned int blueHeight; unsigned char* red; unsigned char* green; unsigned char* blue; } NativeBitmap; void deleteBitmap(NativeBitmap* bitmap); int initBitmapMemory(NativeBitmap* bitmap, int width, int height); As I explained in my previous post here on introduction to flow of native functions in Phimpme-Android, we defined the native functions with necessary arguments in Java part of Phimpme. We needed the image bitmap to be sent to the native part of the Phimpme application. So the argument in the function should have been java Bitmap object. But as mentioned earlier, the C code cannot interpret this java bitmap object directly as an image. So we created a function for getting pixels from a bitmap object in the Java class of Phimpme application. This function returns an array of unsigned integers which correspond to the pixels of a particular row of the image bitmap. The array of integers can be interpreted by C, so we can send this array of integers to native part and create a receiving native function to create NativeBitmap. We performed image processing operations like enhancing and applying filters on this NativeBitmap and after the processing is done, we sent the array of integers corresponding to a row of the image bitmap and constructed the Java Bitmap Object using those received arrays in java. The integers present in the array correspond to the color value of a particular pixel of the image bitmap. We used this color value to get red, green…

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Read more about the article Selecting Best persistent storage for Phimpme Android and how to use it

Selecting Best persistent storage for Phimpme Android and how to use it

As we are progressing in our Phimpme Android app. I added account manager part which deals with connecting all other accounts to phimpme. Showing a list of connected accounts. We need a persistent storage to store all the details such as username, full name, profile image url, access token (to access API). I researched on various Object Relation mapping (ORMs) such as: DBFlow: https://github.com/Raizlabs/DBFlow GreenDAO: https://github.com/greenrobot/greenDAO SugarORM: http://satyan.github.io/sugar/ Requery: https://github.com/requery/requery and other NoSQL databases such as Realm Database : https://github.com/realm/realm-java. After reading a lot from some blogs on the benchmarking of these ORMs and database, I came to know that Realm database is quite better in terms of Speed of writing data and ease of use. Steps to integrate Realm Database: Installation of Realm database in android Following these steps https://realm.io/docs/java/latest/#installation quickly setup realm in android. Add classpath "io.realm:realm-gradle-plugin:3.3.2" in Project level build.gradle file and Add apply plugin: 'realm-android' in app level build.gradle, That’s it for using Realm Generating required Realm models Firstly, make sure what you need to store in your database. In case of phimpme, I first go through the account section and noted down what needs to be there.  Profile image URL, username, full name, account indicator image name. Below image illustrate this better. This is the Realm Model class I made in Kotlin to store name, username and access token for accessing API. open class AccountDatabase(       @PrimaryKey var name: String = "",       var username: String = "",       var token: String = "" ) : RealmObject() Writing data in database In Account manager, I create a add account option from where a dialog appear with a list of accounts. Currently, Twitter is working, when onSuccess function invoke in AccountPickerFragment I start a twitter session and store values in database. Writing data in database: // Begin realm transaction realm.beginTransaction(); // Creating Realm object for AccountDatabase Class account = realm.createObject(AccountDatabase.class,       accountsList[0]); account.setUsername(session.getUserName()); account.setToken(String.valueOf(session.getAuthToken())); realm.commitTransaction(); Begin and commit block in necessary. There is one more way of doing this is using execute function in Realm Use Separate Database Helper class for Database operations It’s good to use a separate class for all the Database operations needed in the project. I created a DatabaseHelper Class and added a function to query the result needed. Query the database public RealmResults<AccountDatabase> fetchAccountDetails(){   return realm.where(AccountDatabase.class).findAll(); } It give all of the results, stored in the database like below Problems I faced with annotation processor while using Kotlin and Realm together The Kotlin annotation processor not running due to the plugins wrong order. This issue https://github.com/realm/realm-java/pull/2568 helped me in solving that. I addded apply plugin: 'kotlin-kapt'. In app gradle file and shift apply plugin: 'realm-android' In below the order. Resources: Realm for Android (official): https://news.realm.io/news/realm-for-android/ Write in Realm Database: https://realm.io/docs/java/latest/#writes Queries in Realm Database: https://realm.io/docs/java/latest/#queries A detailed Blog post on Realm Database: https://medium.com/@Zhuinden/how-to-use-realm-for-android-like-a-champ-and-how-to-tell-if-youre-doing-it-wrong-ac4f66b7f149  

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