Q:

How do they do it? Dialogs over home screen

I'm writing an Android application and I would like to place a dialog or view over the home screen so that a user can enter text without jumping into my full application. I can't seem to get this to work. If I present a dialog (even in a transparent activity), my application launches.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the Facebook widget. I want to replicate a similar behavior to the clicking on the "What's on your mind?" box.
Thanks for any help in advance!
-Brian

A:

My problem was that the application always launched to display the dialog.
To solve this, I set the activity lauch mode to singleInstance in the manifest. Now it shows the dialog over the home screen!

A:

They are launching an activity, but they've set the activity's theme so it looks like a Dialog.
In your manifest, you have to add something like this under the <activity> tag: android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Dialog" 

