Android Development

New features are:

• New user interface - As I mentioned when we introduced the m3 version of the Android SDK, we’re continuing to refine the UI that’s available for Android. m5-rc14 replaces the previous placeholder with a new UI, but as before, work on it is still in-progress.
• Layout animations - Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package. Check out the LayoutAnimation*.java files in the APIDemos sample code for examples of how this works.
• Geo-coding - android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e. translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa), and also search for businesses.
• New media codecs - The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.
• Updated Eclipse plug-in - A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

You can get the new version for Windows, Mac, and Linux at: http://code.google.com/android/download_list.html

Related Links:

• de.internet.com
• Android Blog

I believe this is the best for the first entry of a development blog!

www.AndroidDevelopment.org has just been born. This is huge!

Please let me first introduce myself: My name is Patrick, I am a software developer, addicted to every high tech gadget, non-smoker, and so on. I am a product made in Germany and studied “Communications and Informations of Computer Science” at a German university. After gratuating I started working in the field of mobile software by first becoming developer, then head of development, then founded and co-founded several software companies. When I came across the Android platform of the Open Handset Alliance I was very excited.

Since of my huge experience in mobile software development (which includes Symbian, Windows Mobile, Brew, Palm, BlackBerry, and others) I know excatly which platforms are promising. The Android approach is very - and I say very - interesting. As most of you might own a mobile phone, pda, smartphone, whatever for a long time, you might also know that there is a variety of platforms for mobile devices and every platform goes its own way. The unified approach of Android can only be a success when there are a lot of mobile device vendors who implement Android on their devices.

What this blog is about: This blog is meant to bring some personal experiences of me and the Android development to the community. This community is you! Besides the vendors implementing the Android platform, the most important factor of a successful mobile device platform is its compatibility. Compatibility in an open approach for more 3rd party applications. Those applications bring more value to a device and encourage potential users to get an Android-powered “GPhone”. While Google, Inc. is a great company with great developers and even greater applications and services; they cannot do all by their own. Especially the small gadget pieces of software we are looking are mostly not developed by companies. AndroidDevelopment.org is meant to provide you with ideas, code samples, small applications that are interesting to the Android platform.

I am very excited what we will see here in future! Stay tuned!