Supporting Honeycomb pt1: targetSdkVersion=11

Since the day I started at Google I've been trying to find the time to update all of my Android apps to support Honeycomb. However, I'm into my 3rd month and various distractions, like the awesome I/O, have meant that I haven't touched any of them.

So, here we go, part 1, Honeycomb support for 3 of the 9 apps I have live in the Android Market. I'll confess now that I've chosen the easiest 3, in fact they are all so easy that there is just one line to change. The apps are Auto Bright, Dimmer (Night Mode) and The Cleaner.

These apps all run in compatibility mode on Honeycomb, which means it shows the 'menu button' in the system bar to the right of the previous tasks, home and back buttons. To sort this out all you have to do is update the AndroidManifest to ensure it includes:

<uses-sdk android:targetSdkVersion="11"/>

Now that extra compatibility icon will vanish and technically these apps will support Honeycomb, perfect!

For the sake of completeness I've taken this opportunity to also furnish 'The Cleaner' with support for Honeycomb's Lights out Mode. This mode reduces the system bar elements on a Honeycomb device to small dots, making them less distracting. It is usually used for immersive experiences in games, video players, image galleries, etc...

To set Lights Out Mode on a view, just set the system UI visibility to STATUS_BAR_HIDDEN.

v.setSystemUiVisibility(View.STATUS_BAR_HIDDEN);

--- Updated 24/05/2011 ---
As WarGoth points out there is no need to use reflection to maintain backwards compatibility, simply wrapping the code in an android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT>=android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.HONEYCOMB check is sufficient. Clarification in the comments from Weeds that this only applies to Android 2.0+, the class loader would throw a java.lang.VerifyError on 1.5/1.6.

if(android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT>=android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.HONEYCOMB) {
    v.setSystemUiVisibility(View.STATUS_BAR_HIDDEN);
}
--- End ---

I did it slightly differently by using reflection to maintain compatibility with older versions of Android without duplicating classes:

Class classView = Class.forName("android.view.View");
Method methodSetSystemUIVisibility = classView.getDeclaredMethod("setSystemUiVisibility", int.class);
methodSetSystemUIVisibility.invoke(v,1);


The full source of these apps is available on Google Code

Part 2 of this series will take on converting one of my more complicated applications.