zeaster

ZInfo is finally released for Android Developer Challenge after our many hard working days.
It's an information sharing platform based on your contacts and location.
The video demo can be found at http://infosword.com/zinfo/video.html.

We gave a presentation about ZInfo on Beijing Open Party - Before the Rain.
It makes me the most excited that I meet a lot of open source followers.
They are very friendly, full of passion, enjoy coding! I learned a lot from them.

Special thanks to cleverpig!
He is so kind and want to sponsor us a server to host ZInfo.
And he understands us fully when we decided to put off releasing publicly recently.

It's so great to meet you guys in the community!

These days, I've been developing an application that reads and writes entries from/into Android Contacts.
Everything goes fine until I need to insert email entry into Android Contact by Contact Content Provider API.

This is how to insert a people or phone entry into contact (people, phones table):
getContentProvider().insert(People.CONTENT_URI, values);
getContentProvider().insert(Phones.CONTENT_URI, values);

That's fine according to
http://code.google.com/android/devel/data/contentproviders.html

However when I insert an email entry into contact (in contact_methods table) using:
ContentURI uri = getContentProvider().insert(ContactMethods.CONTENT_URI, values);

It just returns null, nothing inserted, and nothing shows up on logcat.
Why? the link above says it should be fine!
To find the answer, I post a thread in Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/9ed4ff7fc1338b7c
However no response.
then I have been diving into build-in Contacts Application for 2 days to find how Google used their own api.
Luckily, I got the key.
see details on my another post:
http://zeaster.com/blog/2007/11/28/how-to-decompile-dex-file-on-android/

You should insert an email like this:
ContentURI uri = People.CONTENT_URI.addId(user_id).addPath("contact_methods");
ContentValues values = ...
uri = getContentResolver().insert(uri, values);

why? I guess Google should provide one same way to insert content.

That's the main inconvenience.
I guess what's even worse is Google does not provide enough docs or log warnings for this tip.
Here are the others:

2.
when insert an email for a not-created-yet user id, It's still inserted successfully.
when the user id created in the future, the user would have the email address.
I guess Google should prevent this happen.
Actually many checks Google need to do.That's really a beta SDK.

3.
The content provider API is not Object-Oriented enough.
I feel it tedious to use.

4.
Maybe this is greedy.
I hope there is API to manipulate database that's similar to ActiveRecord for Rails.
Maybe I will implement one like that if time permits.