DISCLAIMER: Expressed views on this blog are my own.
One thing I've encountered with Android since my internship was handling the orientation changes. Orientation changes are part of a wider thing called configuration changes which will kill your activity and start it over (personally I think is stupid, but it make sense). Killing your activity and making it restart will possibly change the layout according to your layout structure (layout-port, layout-land, etc etc etc). Read about it here.
So at first, I assumed adding orientation|keyboardhidden to the activity in androidmanifest.xml was sufficient because it would send the configuration changes to the activity and let me handle it. Which was great for me and a easy fix. Not until I started to want to use different layouts such as layout-port and layout-land for dialogs in particular (keep in mind I'm using the showdialog function) since what fits in a tablet doesn't mean it fits on a phone. Since I was the one who had to handle the configuration changes that meant I had to switch out the content views, but dialogs don't have a way to handle configuration changes.... This is where the Fragments API comes in.
Fragments, which are basically sub-activities, allow you to handle config changes which is a good thing because now I have the power to change whatever I'd want to change under the configuration change. What I have/had at the time is that user interface is handled by one particular activity with a WebView and possibly a dialog over it. I needed the dialog to change to a different layout according to the structure, but the WebView just had to adjust, so I got rid of all my calls to showdialog() and changed every view/dialog into a Fragment/DialogFragment. With this conversion, I could add a setContentView to the resource id or whatever I wanted to do in the onConfigurationChanged call to the fragment, which would reset the layout. Any listeners or etc. you had attached to the previous layout have to be re-attached to the new layout, so a setupView function is useful.
It takes a while to understand how fragments work exactly when you come from using only Activities (a la < 3.0 Honeycomb). I don't completely understand how they work, but I have an idea, so I am moderately alright with it. When I looked at fragments at first, I thought it was a stupid idea to use it even with the support library, but now i see the practicality of it.
As usual with any Android post, people if you are reading this GET an Android 4.0 phone and dump your previous phone!
