Hi everybody,

I will change the way this blog works a bit. I want to blog more into the “software development” / “Android” direction than about my personal day to day drivers. Also I have the plan to rise the update frequency of this blog and the language changed to English so that users outside Germany can read what I write

So let’s start off with a little Android exercise. Recently I implemented a new language selector for Minimalistic Text. The old one just used the ListPreference in the Android Settings. My main goal has been to add little flags to each language to make this dialog a little more colored.

A short research on the internet showed me that there is no way to get images into a ListPreference. So I had to implement my own Preference that is capable of a list with images.
My first thought was to derive from ListPreference and add the image functionality. But due to the (lack of) design in the ListPreference there is no way to derive a subclass that implements another visual part. The main reason for this is the fact that the ListPreference stores the selected element index into an internal variable (private) that then gets read by the dialog closed event. So a subclass would have to set the index based on its own view to use the ListPreference functionality like propagating the settings change to all listeners.

So the last possibility has been to copy the ListPreference code to my own class and make images in the list possible.

The solution constists of 6 files:

• ImageListPreference.java
• ImagePreferenceArrayAdapter.java
• imagelistpreferencelayout.xml
• empty_content.xml
• orange_content.xml
• clickbackground.xml

Language Selector