Picking up from the last post, I’d share a little more of my Android experience. Once I had configured the phone with my basic settings – voicemail number, wifi networks and so on – and moving my contacts to the phone, installing software is probably the next step. There is an Android market, but it’s just as good (or bad) as the Apple Apps store – finding the best applications may be a pain.

I’ve been using SonyEricsson mobile phones ever since the launch of the P800 some years ago – all with the Symbian OS. Until a few days ago that is. Now I’m on Android. I’m still in the process of finding my way around Android, but I’ll try to post some of the tips and tricks of running Android here. This first post covers the very basics. The Phone My Android phone is the HTC Hero.

In user interfaces, it’s sometimes the case, that you need to have dropdowns with content dynamically loaded from a database, and sure you can query the database and place the content in the HTML-source as regular markup, but you can also write a few lines of jQuery powered javascript, and provide the data from an ajax-source. Here’s how to do it. First make the drop-down and as the single option make a “loading” message - just to let the user know something is happening.

In this mordern web 2.0 age, javascript includes are used more and more - and in some cases solutions often depend on included content from 3rd parties. While it is nice these 3rd parties may provide us with data (such as the latest tweets from twitter), it would be quite nice, if issues on their server didn’t break the fancy page we’re building. So the question is this: If you build a page and include javascript from foreign scripts, will error messages on their part break your site?

Like tables, jQuery also allows you to play around with all other tags. In a recent project, we wanted to change a fixed set of labels/texts into icons instead. For this challenge jQuery was used to build the new image tag, and for good measure, here is a small example of how you can build an image tag - including alt-text and click-event. The basic code for building and inserting an image into the DOM looks like this: