There are a bunch of examples of using WebView to display HTML content loaded from the web in an Android app, including the sample from Google for the WebView class. However the ones I found generally don’t load new pages on their own. I can load up Google, but if you click on anything in the app it launches a browser and takes the user out of the app. The answer to the problem is in the additional points on that Hello, WebView page – you need to set a new WebViewClient to handle the URL load requests. Their example is very helpful, but I prefer to do the override with an anonymous inner class:
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
WebView webview = new WebView(this);
webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
@Override public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
view.loadUrl(url);
return true;
}
});
webview.loadUrl("http://google.com");
setContentView(webview);
}
However, if you follow a link to an image it downloads instead of opens in the view. That’s the same thing the built in browser does, but wasn’t the behavior I expected. I’ll have to figure out how to handle that a bit better.
When you tap the widget once it brings up a selector with launchers for each of the apps you’ve added plus an icon to start the widget configuration interface. Here’s what mine looks like after tapping on the widget:
And what the configuration interface looks like if you tap on that center icon:
I think it’s a pretty slick widget. Great way to increase launcher density if you have a few widgets taking up some space. And it looks pretty good there on the home screen.
