February 26th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Android comes with a wide variety of widgets, small visual construction blocks you can glue together to present the users with complex and useful interfaces. However applications often need higher level visual components. A component can be seen as a c…
February 24th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
The Android UI toolkit offers several layout managers that are rather easy to use and, most of the time, you only need the basic features of these layout managers to implement a user interface. Sticking to the basic features is unfortunately not the mo…
February 20th, 2009 | by Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform | published in Google Android
Last Friday, we enabled developers to upload priced apps and saw a flurry of activity in the days that followed. Today, it is my pleasure to let you know that we have begun the phased rollout of priced applications to T-Mobile G1 users in the US. Onc…
February 19th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Android is a mobile operating system meant to be run on a wide array of devices, with very different hardware configurations. Some devices, like the T-Mobile G1, can change their hardware configuration at runtime. For instance, when you open the keyboa…
February 13th, 2009 | by Eric Chu, Android Mobile Platform | published in Google Android
I’m pleased to announce that Android Market is now accepting priced applications from US and UK developers. Developers from these countries can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application(s) along with …
Track memory allocations
February 12th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Despite the impressive hardware of the first Android phones (T-Mobile G1 and ADP1) writing efficient mobile applications is not always straightforward. Android applications rely on automatic memory management handled by Dalvik’s garbage collector which…
February 11th, 2009 | by Jason Chen | published in Google Android
Android applications can easily be linked together using intents. One example of this involves Shazam, MySpace, and the Amazon MP3 Store. Once Shazam has identified a song, you can also search for the artist’s official MySpace profile page or buy the …
February 9th, 2009 | by Dan Morrill | published in Google Android
Hello, developers! As you may have heard by now, users around the world have started to receive updates to their Android devices that provide new features and functionality. You may also have noticed that the new update reports as “Android 1.1″. Appl…
Avoiding memory leaks
January 20th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Android applications are, at least on the T-Mobile G1, limited to 16 MB of heap. It’s both a lot of memory for a phone and yet very little for what some developers want to achieve. Even if you do not plan on using all of this memory, you should use as …
Why is my list black? An Android optimization
January 13th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
ListView is one of Android’s most widely used widgets. It is rather easy to use, very flexible and incredibly powerful. ListView can also be difficult to understand at times.
One of the most common issues with ListView happens when you try to use a cus…
Can I use this Intent?
January 5th, 2009 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensive…
December 5th, 2008 | by Dan Morrill | published in Google Android
We’re back in action after a Thanksgiving break filled with turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. Now it’s the holiday season (at least, here in the U.S.) and we’re filled with good will toward developers. Today I wanted to talk about a couple things we j…
December 1st, 2008 | by Romain Guy | published in Google Android
Designing and developing user interfaces for Android is very different from doing so in a regular desktop environment. Because Android runs applications on mobile devices, application designers and developers must deal with numerous constraints that ar…
December 1st, 2008 | by Jason Chen | published in Google Android
This week’s developer video features Jason Tomlinson of Hands-On Mobile. He wrote Amazed, an application open sourced in the apps-for-android project. Things Jason mentions in the videos include:Amazed was built primarily to get familiar with the accel…
November 7th, 2008 | by Jason Chen | published in Google Android
Last week we introduced a couple Android developers who shared how they built their Android apps and gave their insight into Android app development. This week, we have videos of two developers who’ve built music-related apps.The first is of Allan Hsu&…