Thursday, September 22, 2011

Displaying Status Bar Notifications in Android

Developers of Android are no doubt familiar with the Toast class, which displays a little pop-up containing whatever message you want to display to the user.

However, the Toast pop-up will automatically dismiss itself after a while, making it useful as a tool to provide timely feedback to the user (such as informing the user that a file has been saved successfully), but not a really good tool to use for some asynchronous action (such as telling the user that an incoming SMS message has arrived). For the latter, you can make use of the Status Bar Notification feature of Android, which displays a persistent notification on the status bar of your Android device. This notification can be dismissed when the user has read it, and thus this makes it a good tool for delivering notifications to the users to respond at their convenience.

In this article, I shall walk you through the steps to creating status bar notifications for your Android application.

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