Homework 3

Due: Thursday February 14, 3:55pm.

Submission URL: http://crowdlab.soe.ucsc.edu/crowdrank3/submission/submit/4

This homework is on WebView.

You have to create an app with a Webview on top, and 5 buttons aligned at the bottom.

The buttons at the bottom consist of:

• Three buttons that give access to three news sites. Pick three news sites (e.g., NYT, BBC, CNN, Santa Cruz Chronicle, etc -- whatever you like), and ensure that each of the three buttons opens one of these sites in the WebView above.
• A button labeled Share, which uses an action.SEND intent to share the current URL.
• The last button is a Menu button (you could use the three dots icon for it), and leads to a second activity, whose sole purpose is to enter, for each of the three buttons, the URL to load, and the label for the button (store the choices in the shared preferences).

When you press a button, say for the NYT, you should bring up the NYT site in the WebView. You should handle URLs in the WebView in such a way that URLs within the site open in the WebView, and URLs that link outside, at your choice,

• Open in an outside browser.
• Open in an outside browser after confirmation.
• Be ignored.

(The simplest thing to do is the first one).

Please remember to shut off the Javascript of the WebView appropriately (see slides presented in class during the lecture on WebViews) when the activity is suspended.

How to proceed

Implementing the second view, where you can choose the URLs the three buttons open, is lower priority. First get the rest to work; you can add the fifth button and the other activity once you get the rest to work.

Food for thought: Suppose that my sites are NYT, BBC, CNN (love these TLAs). If I am reading an article on NYT on the University of California, it would be great that if I switched to CNN by pressing the CNN button, I would land also on a story on UC if CNN carries one, rather than on the CNN news homepage. How would you implement it?

This is not part of the homework, but I plan to discuss in class various strategies to do this. It would be absolutely great if you could give it some thought, so that you could have good suggestions for the class. No coding required; just think at how you would do it.