Problem with Calendar.get(Calendar.HOUR)
I am trying to display in a TextView when my application last updated (e.g., "Last updated at 12:13). I am trying to use a Calendar instance and I thought I understood it correctly but I seem to be having trouble. I know to get an instance I use the method Calendar.getInstance(). And then to get the hour and minute I was using Calendar.get(Calendar.HOUR) and Calendar.get(Calendar.MINUTE). My minute field returns correctly but Calendar.HOUR is returning the hour on a 24 hour clock and I want a 12 hour clock. I thought HOUR_OF_DAY was 24 hour clock. Where am I going wrong?
Here is the code I'm using:
Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance();
mTv.setText("Refreshed! Last updated " +
rightNow.get(Calendar.HOUR) + ":" +
rightNow.get(Calendar.MINUTE) + ".");
mTv is my TextView that I'm updating. Thanks for any help.
Also, it would be ideal if I could say "Last updated 5 minutes ago." instead of "Last updated at 12:13pm". But I'm not sure the best way to have this update each minute without draining resources or the battery...?
Answer
I'd recommend using SimpleDateFormat in combination with the Date class for formatting the time:
Date now = new Date();
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("K:mm a");
String formattedTime = sdf.format(now);
Short explanation how it works: You create a SimpleDateFormat object and pass a String to it's construtor which tells it how to format every time/date object that gets passed to the format() function of it. There are plenty of constants/letters which represent a special time object (e.g. seconds, an AM/PM marker, .. see the class documentation for the full list).
"K:mm a" means a "11:42 AM" format - one or two digits for the hour (depending on its value) in a 12 hour format, always two digits for minutes (mm) and either AM or PM (a), depending on the time.
After you did that, just pass a Date object to the format() function, and you'll get a formatted string. Note that a Date just holds one single point in time, if you create it from the constructor with no arguments ("= new Date()") it uses the current time. If you need another time, you can pass a long argument with the millis, you may get that from Calendar.getTimeInMillis().
As of implementing the "updated XY minutes ago function" - yes you'd have to update this every minute and you have to calculate the difference between the update and the current time. I'd say it's not worth it from a battery and extra work perspective. If your app uses standard short update cycles (e.g. every hour or somthing along those lines) and is not fullscreen, the user has a visible clock on top/bottom of his screen. If he really wants to check how long it was since the update, he can take a short look and compare (mostly just minutes or hours/minutes). And IMHO thats no inconvinience for a user, at least it would not for me. I'd just compare without thinking about that. But I tend to kill apps which waste my battery for no useful reason.
Also note that not everybody uses a 12-hour format. To get a localized time format depending on users settings/country use DateFormat.getTimeInstance(). This returns a DateFormat, but this works like the SimpleDateFormat, just pass a time to format().