http://xrigau.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/using-an-actionbar-in-your-application-with-actionbarsherlock/ Works well with 2.2 .
The intents to start navigation and maps are:
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("google.navigation:q=New+York+NY"));
mContext.startActivity(i);
and
the ones listed here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/g-app-intents.html
(for the travel-page.)
Yea, about half way through the app i figured out that i needed to upgrade the layout. My biggest problem was time and knowledge.
I started this project beginning of June and i had zero knowledge in app programming at this point. The goal was to produce 2 apps for EF. One for Android and one for iOs. I have been a programmer for around 15 years, working with it on and off. I have programmed in CGI, PHP, C, Java, VB and C#, C# being my normal language to program in since 6 years now.
So 2 month to program 2 apps for 2 different platforms without any past app programming, without a clue how to design it in a good fashion, mind you i have never owned an iPhone, just one Android device. Besides that my normal full time job as a train driver, some sort of life, USA project that i am co-president of and just being lazy as a normal house cat! This meant that i had to learn a lot of things from scratch, especially app specific things. I had knowledge of Java and that helped me but only to an extent since the way to program an app is different from programming a Windows program in Swing. As for the iOs version. I had programmed a bit in C/C++ so i have the knowledge of pointers and such but i have NEVER ever programmed in Objective-C (found a good tweet about it: Objective-C is the native language of Hell).
So this i had to more or less learn from scratch along with how to do the layout in both apps. It's a bit easier if you don't have to think about the layout but i was not that fortunate.
The funny part was that i also produced a third app during this time for the convention NärCon (narcon.se) in Sweden, end of July. So 3 apps in 2 month *shrugs*. I think they came out pretty good for my produced apps.
Someone pointed out a different design approach and i think i will develop in that direction for next year, along with one of those nice actionbars ^^. Didn't even know that concept until you posted it ;-)
Still need to find "the apple way" to design iPhone apps. My biggest problem, as i wrote, is that i don't own an iPhone. So i can't just download a lot of apps and check different layouts and see pros/cons with them.
It has been a lot of fun at least to produce the apps.
So far the biggest challenge was to get the iPhone tab images to show up. Me and NewEinstein tried soo many different types of images until we finally found the correct sort. Wish they could have just posted an example image at one point so that people could actually figure out how/what to create.
Best regards
Trax the civilized house cat!