How to embed Processing for Android in native Android apps

Android Processing

jonrose08

How to embed Processing for Android in native Android apps

in Android Processing • 2 years ago

Im not sure if I am the only one messing with Processing for Android in eclipse so this might not be of much interest to many folks but I have been experimenting with making processing embed-able in an application as well as being able to be a full screen activity. It actually took only a few edits to the PApplet source which I posted on my github page. Basically i just converted the PApplet class from an Activity to a Fragment (which is a newer API for Honeycomb). This makes managing sketches as application components really easy.

There are for sure somethings that would need to be addressed to make this ideal but so far it seems to be pretty sweet. I made a couple really quick demo apps showing how easy it is to incorporate into an Android app.

This one is a compilation of some of the Processing examples that come with PDE. If the sketch title is pressed multiple times it toggles between displaying the sketch in the frame of displaying the text that draws that sketch.

ala you tube Processing Examples as a Honeycomb app

As soon as I threw this together I started wondering if there would be interest/use for a full blown examples app... not sure yet

and then this little app just demonstrates how easy it is easy to use the Android UI to control your processing sketch. I have to say, this is so far the most fun aspect. Since processing has understandably not been easy to throw in a java/android app, it's nice to be able to make a sketch and have a robust UI separate but playing well together.

Not sure if the edits are worth making a "library" since they are just that, a few edits. I think the main thing I am going to shoot for next is doing this with the new compatibility library which will allow this to be backwards compatible to Android 2.2. For now ill just leave it on my github page. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions I would love to hear

Replies(2)

andres

Re: How to embed Processing for Android in native Android apps

2 years ago

Hey this is very nice, thanks for sharing!

Does you hack only work with the 2D renderer, or also with P3D?

jonrose08

Re: How to embed Processing for Android in native Android apps

2 years ago

It seems to work fine with both. The examples application has both types of sketches. All that really changes from the current PApplet is that the onCreate method is switched to onCreateView and returns the surfaceView. The only other differences are that you don't use setContentView in onCreate (or onCreateView) since that is handled by Android and the fragment, a handful of methods need to be prepended with getActivity(), and obviously the window metrics are different since the Processing sketch size is based on the fragment dimensions.

Top Reply