Home

Announcing Android 2.0 support in the SDK!

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:08:10 +0000

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).

Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

UI framework changes in Android 1.6

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:03:59 +0000

Android 1.6 introduces numerous enhancements and bug fixes in the UI framework. Today, I'd like to highlight ~~three~~ two improvements in particular.

Optimized drawing

The UI toolkit introduced in Android 1.6 is aware of which views are opaque and can use this information to avoid drawing views that the user will not be able to see. Before Android 1.6, the UI toolkit would sometimes perform unnecessary operations by drawing a window background when it was obscured by a full-screen opaque view. A workaround was available to avoid this, but the technique was limited and required work on your part. With Android 1.6, the UI toolkit determines whether a view is opaque by simply querying the opacity of the background drawable. ~~If you know that your view is going to be opaque but that information does not depend on the background drawable, you can simply override the method called isOpaque():~~

@Override
public boolean isOpaque() {
    return true;
}

The value returned by isOpaque() does not have to be constant and can change at any time. For instance, the implementation of ListView in Android 1.6 indicates that a list is opaque only when the user is scrolling it.

Updated: Our apologies—we spoke to soon about isOpaque(). It will be available in a future update to the Android platform.

Gestures on Android 1.6

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:58:52 +0000

Touch screens are a great way to interact with applications on mobile devices. With a touch screen, users can easily tap, drag, fling, or slide to quickly perform actions in their favorite applications. But it's not always that easy for developers. With Android, it's easy to recognize simple actions, like a swipe, but it's much more difficult to handle complicated gestures, which also require developers to write a lot of code. That's why we have decided to introduce a new gestures API in Android 1.6. This API, located in the new package android.gesture, lets you store, load, draw and recognize gestures. In this post I will show you how you can use the android.gesture API in your applications. Before going any further, you should download the source code of the examples.

Creating a gestures library

The Android 1.6 SDK comes with a new application pre-installed on the emulator, called Gestures Builder. You can use this application to create a set of pre-defined gestures for your own application. It also serves as an example of how to let the user define his own gestures in your applications. You can find the source code of Gestures Builders in the samples directory of Android 1.6. In our example we will use Gestures Builder to generate a set of gestures for us (make sure to create an AVD with an SD card image to use Gestures Builder.) The screenshot below shows what the application looks like after adding a few gestures:

Now available: Android 1.6 NDK

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:52:37 +0000

Today Android 1.6 NDK, release 1 is available for download from the Android developer site.

To recap, the NDK is a companion to the SDK that provides tools to generate and embed native ARM machine code within your application packages. This native code has the same restrictions as the VM code, but can execute certain operations much more rapidly. This is useful if you're doing heavy computations, digital processing, or even porting existing code bases written in C or C++.

If you already use the Android 1.5 NDK, upgrading to this release is highly recommended. It provides the following improvements:

Zipalign: an easy optimization

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:48:49 +0000

The Android 1.6 SDK includes a tool called zipalign that optimizes the way an application is packaged. Doing this enables Android to interact with your application more efficiently and thus has the potential to make your application and the overall system run faster. We strongly encourage you to use zipalign on both new and already published applications and to make the optimized version available—even if your application targets a previous version of Android. We'll get into more detail on what zipalign does, how to use it, and why you'll want to do so in the rest of this post.

In Android, data files stored in each application's apk are accessed by multiple processes: the installer reads the manifest to handle the permissions associated with that application; the Home application reads resources to get the application's name and icon; the system server reads resources for a variety of reasons (e.g. to display that application's notifications); and last but not least, the resource files are obviously used by the application itself.

An introduction to Text-To-Speech in Android

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:43:43 +0000

We've introduced a new feature in version 1.6 of the Android platform: Text-To-Speech (TTS). Also known as "speech synthesis", TTS enables your Android device to "speak" text of different languages.

Before we explain how to use the TTS API itself, let's first review a few aspects of the engine that will be important to your TTS-enabled application. We will then show how to make your Android application talk and how to configure the way it speaks.

Getting started with Google Android - OSCON 2008

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:39:03 +0000

Android Development Tutorial

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:33:06 +0000

Android vs Maemo

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:28:43 +0000

Technically, both Maemo and Android run on Linux kernels. However, Maemo is a full Linux distro, based on Debian, while Android is a sole kernel with a few programs on top of it (namely, Dalvik virtual machine and Sqlite database). On Adnroid all applications run within Dalvik virtual machine, which is heavily optimized and modified version of Java virtual machine (JVM). I tried to analyze the benefits of each platform from the perspective of a software developer, as well as platforms' current "strategic position". If you are too busy to read all the details, there is a short summary paragraph at the end of each chapter.

Android: Sharing your mobile connection with your computer

info@whyandroid.com (admin) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:35:20 +0000

This post shows how easy is to share your mobile network to your Ubuntu 9.04 computer (should work with other Linux distributions as well) using your HTC Hero.
Tethering with no rooting, no drivers to install (as with other OSs), no complex settings...
Too boring, it just works.

enable mobile network sharing in your phone

for this option to work USB cable must be connected