cine 🎥

What?

Cine is a light weight library to enable (or mimic) rich view notifications currently not supported by RemoteViews. e.g. video playback.

Why?

There was a desire to get video into notifications and instead of being jealous of iOS I wrote this. Maybe in the future Android will support this, but right now, there is Cine. Although Cine's main use case is for video, it does not provide a video player. The aim was to be light weight and allow developers to provide and attach their own embedded video player to the Cine container. This is because video playback is usually fairly custom. Things like DRM and other highly optimised an custom playback is not something for Cine to care about. The aim of Cine is to get any rich content in a notification(ish).

How?

Since RemoteViews do not support a lot of layout types and its fairly limited when you want to display something like video this library mimics the look and feel of a notification to allow developers to provide this richer content to users in a digestable notification style.

The library simply provides an abstract Activity with a container to attach your rich notification content.

Adding Library

To add the library fist add JitPack as a repo to your main build.gradle.

    repositories {
        maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
    }

Then in your app build.gradle add cine as a dependency

implementation 'com.github.Daio-io:cine:v0.1.0'

Implementing

Create an activity extending from CineNotificationActivity<Parcelable> and override the two abstract methods onReady and onDismiss.

CineNotificationActivity Set your data class or pojo as the generic type when extending the activity. This will be need to be a Parcelable type and will be sent to the activity intent so that it is available during the onReadycall.

e.g. data class or pojo

@Parcelize
  data class MyVideoDataItem(val title: String,
                       val url: String) : Parcelable

Extend the activity

class MyVideoViewNotificationActivity : CineNotificationActivity<MyVideoDataItem>() {

    override fun onReady(container: ViewGroup, content: VideoItem) {
    }


    override fun onDismiss() {
        finish()
    }
}

After you have created your activity make sure you register it in your AndroidManifest.xml

<activity
          android:name=".path.to.my.MyVideoViewNotificationActivity"
          android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize"
          android:excludeFromRecents="true"
          android:launchMode="singleTask"
          android:theme="@style/Theme.Transparent" />

Make sure you use the android:theme="@style/Theme.Transparent". This will ensure the background is transparent and the view looks like a notification.

The onReady call will deliver your data class and the container once it has wired up and is ready for you to attach your view to the container.

onDismiss will be called when the activity is being destroyed or has been swiped away. Use this to do any clean up.

You can also override a few more method to customise as you please:

        setNotificationBodyText(content.title)
        setAppName("My App")
        setAppIcon(R.drawable.abc_ic_star_black_36dp)
        setButtons(CineButton("OK", {
            finish()
        }), CineButton("Close", {
            finish()
        }))
}

You can also override any of the usual activity methods if you want to do anything more custom.

See a full example here

Usage

In order to display your notification activity you need to apply a content pending intent to your normal Notification content intent. The same way you would launch your app from a notification.

First use the createNotificationIntent helper function to create an intent with the parcelable data class and your CineNotificationActivity you created earlier. Like so:

val videoItem = MyVideoDataItem("My Video", "https://myvideo.mp4")
val intent = createNotificationIntent(this, videoItem, MyVideoViewNotificationActivity::class.java)

And simply create a PendingIntent, add to the notification builder and display as normal.

        val resultPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(
                this,
                0,
                intent,
                PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT)

        val notification = NotificationCompat.Builder(this, "default")
                .setContentIntent(resultPendingIntent)

You should now be able to launch your CineNotification from your usual notifications.

See a full example in the sample app

Daio-io / cine