Rss Reader App Android Tutorial 1: ListView and ArrayAdapter

Working on a real project is the best way to learn a new programing language. In this tutorial, I will create a RSS Reader application for android step by step. This android application will read rss feed from the website, parse the xml and show all the post in a ListView. So we will cover following android development knowledge:

In this android app example, I will implement a ListView which can show all the post entities from Rss feed. For each list cell view, there are three components, ImageView which is for post featured image, TextView which is for post title, and another TextView which will show post date.

ListView and ArrayAdapter with Data Array
ListView and ArrayAdapter with Data Array

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How to Add Smart Banners in Your Android and iPad Apps

A new ad unit, Smart Banner, is introduced after AdMob v6.0. This new ad banner make us able to render multiple size of ads on any screen size, regardless it is Portrait or landscape. Lack of screen size standard, there are too many different screen size mobiles and tablets we are using in the world. It make us too hard to create our apps to fit with all the types of screen size.

Smart Banner help us to solve the screen size problem. It smartly detect the width and height of the phone in current orientation and decide to show the most suitable size of ads in our apps. One piece of code can solve the problem to show different size ads in different device where our apps are running. For example, the Smart Banner can show either 320×50 or 360×50 size ads in portrait mode. While in landscape mode, it will show an ad in 480×32 or 682×32 which is depending on the height of the phone.

Download and Try The Example App
AdmobSmartBannerExampleQR

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Ideal CPC for AdMob Apps

In last post, I mentioned that there are three factors to affect your free apps income which are using AdMob as their first monetization method. One of the three factors is CPC, Cost per click, which indicates the amount we can earn from a user clicks on the ad each time in the apps. The CPC is depending on the advertisers’ decision. Some advertisers are willing to put more budgets on their ads to increase the chance to display. As developers, we cannot control which ads we are showing because all the ads are returned by AdMob. But we can predict the high CPC ads from some certain industries. There are some industries providing very high CPC ads. For example, the advertisers from financial industry always pay a lot on their ads. Therefore, if your apps are severing for financial features, you will get high CPC ads for sure.
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Guide for Beginners: Start to Monetize Your Apps with AdMob

Several friends of mine are creating Apps to earn money on both Android and IOS platforms. Most of them provide their apps for free and use AdMob to monetize their apps. In this business model, they have meet lots of problems in the past few months, and there are still some issues they are facing now. After talking with these guys, I think it will be very helpful to share some tips about monetize free apps by AdMob with those people who want to try but haven’t tried yet.
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How to Choose Tablets Between iPad mini, Google Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD

These days, I decide to buy my first tablet. However, it is very hard for me to choose because there are so many tablets released this year. Currently, Apple has three iPad tablets products, iPad mini, iPad 2 and iPad with retina. Google also released their first android tablet, Google Nexus 7. At the same time, Amazon updated their Kindle Fire to Kindle Fire HD in 7 inch screen and 8.9 inch screen. Another big tablets vendor, Samsung also release several tablets in different models.
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