Last night I released new Android app. Hire*A*Droid is a search engine app that you can use – no gimmicks, no ads, free as a bird! Check it out on Android market or at www.hireadroid.com

Read my tutorial article in Androidguys.com outlining the steps

To my dismay I found out that out of the box Android’s Spinner only supports String values for its items. Yes – you can write a custom SpinnerAdapter to support any type of object but if you are just looking for HTML-list type of functionality where you can provide both – label and value for the item there’s a simpler way:

• Define your Spinner as usual in your layout.xml
• Add 2 array sections to your array.xml: one for labels, other one for values
• The values array can be String or Integer the key – you should have same number of entries in the corresponding order between 2 arrays
• Add labels array to the Spinner definition as

  <Spinner android:entries="@arrays/labels"/>

• In your code, whenever you need to get value for the selected Spinner item, get it form the value array as follows:

      String selectedVal = getResources().getStringArray(
          R.array.values)[spinner.getSelectedItemPosition()];
  

9:15 P.M. PST. I’m tracing familiar pattern on the smooth surface  of my beloved MyTouch. Time to switch on the silent mode and call it quits. But wait – there’s few notifications in the toolbar! Sliding it down and yoopee! My donut (Android firmware 1.6) was just delivered fresh from the oven! The install process takes less than 5 minutes, not a glitch in sight. Screen goes black, I’m thinking (mistakenly) that phone is shut down, but no – it’s just asleep.

Accessing the screen: everything looks the same, works the same but the firmware version reads 1.6 and familiar golden spinner is replaced by new industrial-looking gray icon.

Hello Donut! And you know what – it may as well be wishful thinking but it does feel snappier.