With the market for Android apps now bigger than ever before, the media of Android apps is a potent tool for advertising and expanding the user base for your website or blog. That requires a basic knowledge of some tools that are necessary for building an Android app. This article tells you that how can you go about to build an Android app for your WordPress blog.
Your aim is to create a mobile centric Android application that uses normal HTML tags and brings in data from the WordPress using RSS feeds. The layout and the stylisation of the page is handled by the jQuery mobile library. It also helps in making the application multiple platform capable. Lastly, we use the Phonegap software to convert it into a full fledged Android app. But first, you start by creating an HTML document.
You will need to get a basic understanding of the jQuery Mobile. There are various online tutorials that will help you out with that. This software or rather application handles screen layouts, transition effects, AJAX etc. Your application will comprise of sections and each section will have it’s own page. jQuery handles smooth movement between these very pages.
Besides that, your app will be reading the WordPress blog via RSS feeds. You need to communicate the feed requests to WordPress through Google feeds API so that you don’t get trapped in cross domain security restrictions. You might want to display thumbnail pics along titles in the app. To enable that, just remember to add Media RSS elements in the WordPress feeds. You can also make this app work in off line environment. Using the local storage/HTML 5 storage you can access app contents even while you are offline. If you happen to rewrite the video embed code to HTML5 compatible IFRAME code, then your app won’t have problems embedding Youtube videos inside.
Now that your HTML document is ready, you have one final task of converting it to a ‘.apk‘ extension file or the Android app file. This part is carried out easily by an application called the PhoneGap. It turns javaScript, CSS, HTML documents into Android apps in a few steps. You can then go to the Android developers site to choose from the many app icons in photoshop format. You may also edit them to be in sync with app concept. The best part of using jQuery for making an HTML document is the multi platform readiness that it provides. jQuery HTML documents can be run on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian. Thus, it reduces workload and let’s create apps for many platforms at one go.
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