Many a time I see this problem where the Android emulator simply refuses to connect to internet. There are 2 easy solutions to fix this problem.

1. The primary reason is that your machine might have both LAN and Wireless enabled and the internet connection is available only on Wireless. Since the emulator always tries LAN to for DNS settings it will be unable to connect. To fix this problem

• Right click on your “My Network Places” and select properties
• Select your LAN connection and disable it.
• Restart your emulator

2. If the above solution doesn’t work then try launching your emulator with the following command prompt.

emulator -avd <avd name> -verbose -dns-server 8.8.8.8

or if you are using eclipse to start the emulator then

• Right click on your project and select “debug as”
• Select “de...

In one of my application I had to download data from server which took almost 10-15 seconds and I didn’t want my users to stare at a progress dialog with just loading message.

I wanted to customize the default ProgressDialog to display interesting facts so that the user feels that they are waiting too long for the data.

My first step was to create my own layout and set the layout using the method setContentView method. But seems this method though available but cannot be used since it throws the following error

android.util.AndroidRuntimeException: requestFeature() must be called before adding content

So I tried to write my own dialog by sub classing Dialog but figured out that there is a better way by sub classing AlertDialog.

AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog...

I have been using my eclipse instance for months and on the day of a crucial release it stopped working (May be just to prove Murphy’s law). I had several instance of eclipse (I usually have different instance for J2EE, Android, Blackberry etc) and all the instance showed me exactly the same error.

JVM terminated. Exit code=-1
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M
-Djava.class.path=D:eclipseAndroideclipseplugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.201.R35x_v20090715.jar
-os win32
-ws win32
-arch x86
-showsplash
-launcher D:eclipseAndroideclipseeclipse.exe
-name Eclipse
--launcher.library D:eclipseAndroideclipseplugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519eclipse_1206.dll
-startup D:eclipseAndroideclipseplugins/org...