It’s Fab Friday again! I missed last week, felled by a nasty cold. But you can’t keep Fab Friday down. Just back, I decided to roll out this screencast on Autocomplete in the Places Library of the Google Maps API:

As you can see, there’s a lot you can do with autocomplete.

Continuing my attachment to maps of imaginary places, here’s a map of Skyrim, from the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The map uses the Google Maps API Custom Map Type to display custom tiles.

I also love tools that allow you to create your own maps, like Harvard World Map. World Map allows you to create a map based on datasets that are provided, and allows you to add your own data layers. You can then embed those maps in other sites or link to them on the World Map site. This example shows population density in China:

Have a good weekend!

“...what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.”

Licensed Category:

Free Category:

[This post is by Daniel Lehmann, Tech Lead on the Android Apps team. — Tim Bray]

[We’re trying something new; There’s a post over on Google+ where we’ll host a discussion of this article. Daniel Lehmann has agreed to drop by and participate. Come on over and join in!]

With Android Ice Cream Sandwich, we set out to build software that supports emotional connections between humans and the devices they carry. We wanted to build the most personal device that the user has ever owned.

The first ingredient in our recipe is to show users the people that they care about most in a magazine-like way. High-resolution photos replace simple lists of text.

The second ingredient is to more prominently visualize their friends’ activities. We show updates from multiple sources wherever a contact is displayed, without the need to open each social networking app individually.

Android is an open platform, and in Ice Cream Sandwich we provide a rich new API to allow any social networking application to integrate with the system. This post explains how apps like Google+ use these APIs, and how other social networks can do the same.

A few basics

Since Eclair (Android 2.0), the system has been able to join contacts from different sources. Android can notice if you are connected to the same person and different networks, and join those into aggregate contacts.

Essential terms to understand throughout the remainder of this post are:

• RawContact is a contact as it exists in one source, for example a friend in Skype.

• Data rows exists for each piece of information that the raw contact contains (name, phone number, email address, etc.).

• A Contact joins multiple raw contacts into one aggregate. This is what the user perceives as a real contact in the People and Phone apps.

• A sync adapter synchronizes its raw contacts with its cloud source. It can be bundled with a Market application (examples: Skype, Twitter, Google+).

While users deal with contacts, sync adapters work with their raw contact rows. They own the data inside a raw contact, but by design it is left up to Android to properly join raw contact rows with others.

Contacts sync adapters have a special xml file that describes their content, which is documented in the Android SDK. In the following paragraphs, we’ll assume this file is named contacts.xml.

The Android SDK also contains the application SampleSyncAdapter (and its source code) that implements everything mentioned in here in an easy to understand way.

High resolution photos

In Android versions prior to Honeycomb (3.0), contact photos used to be 96x96. Starting with ICS, they now have a thumbnail (which is the 96x96 version) and a display photo. The display photo’s maximum size can vary from device to device (On Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S, it is currently configured to be 256x256, but expect this to vary with future devices). The size as configured can be queried like this:

private static int getPhotoPickSize(Context context) {
  // Note that this URI is safe to call on the UI thread.
  Cursor c = context.getContentResolver().query(DisplayPhoto.CONTENT_MAX_DIMENSIONS_URI,
      new String[]{ DisplayPhoto.DISPLAY_MAX_DIM }, null, null, null);
  try {
    c.moveToFirst();
    return c.getInt(0);
  } finally {
    c.close();
  }
}

This value is useful if you need to query the picture from the server (as you can specify the right size for the download). If you already have a high resolution picture, there is no need for any resizing on your side; if it is too big, the contacts provider will downsample it automatically.

Up until now, pictures were written using a ContentValues object, just like all the other data rows of the raw contact. While this approach is still supported, it might fail when used with bigger pictures, as there is a size limit when sending ContentValues across process boundaries. The prefered way now is to use an AssetFileDescriptor and write them using a FileOutputStream instead:

private static void saveBitmapToRawContact(Context context, long rawContactId, byte[] photo) throws IOException {
    Uri rawContactUri = ContentUris.withAppendedId(RawContacts.CONTENT_URI, rawContactId);
    Uri outputFileUri =
        Uri.withAppendedPath(rawContactUri, RawContacts.DisplayPhoto.CONTENT_DIRECTORY);
    AssetFileDescriptor descriptor = context.getContentResolver().openAssetFileDescriptor(
        outputFileUri, "rw");
    FileOutputStream stream = descriptor.createOutputStream();
    try {
      stream.write(photo);
    } finally {
      stream.close();
      descriptor.close();
    }
}

For best results, store uncompressed square photos and let the contacts provider take care of compressing the photo. It will create both a thumbnail and a display photo as necessary.

This API is available on API version 14+. For older versions, we recommend to fallback to the old method using ContentValues and assuming a constant size of 96x96.

Update streams

The API for update streams is the biggest new addition for contacts in Ice Cream Sandwich. Sync adapters can now enrich their contact data by providing a social stream that includes text and photos.

This API is intended to provide an entry point into your social app to increase user engagement. We chose to only surface the most recent few stream items, as we believe that your social app will always be the best way to interact with posts on your network.

StreamItems rows are associated with a raw contact row. They contain the newest updates of that raw contact, along with text, time stamp and comments. They can also have pictures, which are stored in StreamItemPhotos. The number of stream items per raw contact has a limit, which on the current Nexus devices is set to 5, but expect this number to change with future devices. The limit can be queried like this:

private static int getStreamItemLimit(Context context) {
  // Note that this URI is safe to call on the UI thread.
  Cursor c = context.getContentResolver().query(StreamItems.CONTENT_LIMIT_URI,
      new String[]{ StreamItems.MAX_ITEMS }, null, null, null);
  try {
    c.moveToFirst();
    return c.getInt(0);
  } finally {
    c.close();
  }
}

When displayed in the People app, stream items from all participating raw contacts will be intermixed and shown chronologically.

The following function shows how to add a stream item to an existing raw contact:

private static void addContactStreamItem(Context context, long rawContactId, String text,
    String comments, long timestamp, String accountName, String accountType){
  ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
  values.put(StreamItems.RAW_CONTACT_ID, rawContactId);
  values.put(StreamItems.TEXT, "Breakfasted at Tiffanys");
  values.put(StreamItems.TIMESTAMP, timestamp);
  values.put(StreamItems.COMMENTS, comments);
  values.put(StreamItems.ACCOUNT_NAME, accountName);
  values.put(StreamItems.ACCOUNT_TYPE, accountType);
  context.getContentResolver().insert(StreamItems.CONTENT_URI, values);
}

You can also specify an action that should be executed when a stream item or one of its photos is tapped. To achieve this, specify the receiving Activities in your contacts.xml using the tags viewStreamItemActivity and viewStreamItemPhotoActivity:

<ContactsAccountType
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  viewStreamItemActivity="com.example.activities.ViewStreamItemActivity”
  viewStreamItemPhotoActivity="com.example.activities.ViewStreamItemPhotoActivity">
  <!-- Description of your data types -->
</ContactsAccountType>

Update streams are available on API version 15+ and are intended to replace the StatusUpdate API. For previous versions, we recommend that you fall back to the StatusUpdates API, which only shows a single text item and no pictures.

“Me” profile

Ice Cream Sandwich is the first version of Android that supports the “Me” contact, which is prominently shown at the top of the list of the new People app. This simplifies use-cases that used to be a multi-tap process in previous versions — for example, sharing personal contact data with another person or “navigating home” in a navigation app. Also it allows applications to directly address the user by name and show their photo.

The “Me” profile is protected by the new permissions READ_PROFILE and WRITE_PROFILE. The new functionality is powerful; READ_PROFILE lets developers access users’ personally identifying information. Please make sure to inform the user on why you require this permission.

The entry point to the new API is ContactsContract.Profile and is available on API version 14+.

Add connection

Previously, connecting with users on a social network involved opening the respective social networking app, searching for the person and then connecting (“Friend”, “Follow” etc.). Ice Cream Sandwich has a much slicker approach: When looking at an existing contact in the People application, the user can decide to add this person to another network as well. For example, the user might want to follow a person on Google+ that they already have as a contact in Gmail.

Once the user taps one of the “Add connection” commands, the app is launched and can look for the person using the information that is already in the contact. Search criteria are up to the app, but good candidates are name, email address or phone number.

To specify your “Add connection” menu item, use the attributes inviteContactActivity and inviteContactActionLabel in your contacts.xml:

<ContactsAccountType
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  inviteContactActivity="com.example.activities.InviteContactActivity"
  inviteContactActionLabel="@string/invite_action_label">
  <!-- Description of your data types -->
</ContactsAccountType>

Be sure to use the same verb as you typically use for adding connections, so that in combination with your app icon the user understands which application is about to be launched.

The “Add connection” functionality is available on API version 14+.

Contact-view notification

High-resolution pictures need a lot of space, and social streams quickly become outdated. It is therefore not a good idea to keep the whole contacts database completely in sync with the social network. A well-written sync adapter should take importance of contacts into account; as an example, starred contacts are shown with big pictures, so high-resolution pictures are more important. Your network might also have its own metrics that can help to identify important contacts.

For all other contacts, you can register to receive a notification which is sent by the People app to all sync adapters that contribute to a contact whenever the contact’s detail page is opened. At that point, you can provide additional information. As an example, when the Google+ sync adapter receives this notification, it pulls in the high-resolution photo and most recent social stream posts for that user and writes them to the contacts provider. This can be achieved by adding the viewContactNotifyService attribute to contacts.xml:

<ContactsAccountType
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  viewContactNotifyService="com.example.notifier.NotifierService">
  <!-- Description of your data types -->
</ContactsAccountType>

When this Intent is launched, its data field will point to the URI of the raw contact that was opened.

These notifications are available with API version 14+.

Summary

With Ice Cream Sandwich, we improved key areas around high resolution photos and update streams, and simplified the creation of new connections.

Everything outlined in here is done using open APIs that can be implemented by any network that wants to participate. We’re excited to see how developers take advantage of these new features!

• Myth: In 2011, Google made $36 billion selling information about users like you. [Fairsearch - PDF]
• Fact: Google does not sell, trade or rent personally identifiable user information. Advertisers can run ads on Google that are matched to search keywords, or use our services to show ads based on anonymous data, such as your location or the websites you’ve visited.

• Myth: Google’s Privacy Policy changes make it harder for users to control their personal information. [Microsoft]
• Fact: Our privacy controls have not changed. Period. Our users can: edit and delete their search history; edit and delete their YouTube viewing history; use many of our services signed in or out; use Google Dashboard and our Ads Preferences Manager to see what data we collect and manage the way it is used; and take advantage of our data liberation efforts if they want to remove information from our services.

• Myth: Google is changing our Privacy Policy to make the data we collect more valuable to advertisers. [Microsoft]
• Fact: The vast majority of the product personalization Google does is unrelated to ads—it’s about making our services better for users. Today a signed-in user can instantly add an appointment to their Calendar when a message in Gmail looks like it’s about a meeting, or read Google Docs within their email.
  
  
• Myth: Google reads your email. [Microsoft]
• Fact: No one reads your email but you. Like most major email providers, our computers scan messages to get rid of spam and malware, as well as show ads that are relevant to you.

• Myth: Google Apps aren't safe, and aren't government-certified. [Microsoft]
• Fact: Google's Apps are certified for government use because they are secure.

• Myth: Google’s Privacy Policy changes jeopardize government information in Google Apps. [SafeGov.org]
• Fact: Our new Privacy Policy does not change our contractual agreements, which have always superseded Google’s Privacy Policy for enterprise customers.

• Myth: Microsoft’s approach to privacy is better than Google’s. [Microsoft]
• Fact: We don’t make judgments about other people’s policies or controls. But our industry-leading Privacy Dashboard, Ads Preferences Manager and data liberation efforts enable you to understand and control the information we collect and how we use it—and we’ve simplified our privacy policy to make it easier to understand. Microsoft has no data liberation effort or Dashboard-like hub for users. Their privacy policy states that “information collected through one Microsoft service may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft services.”

• Develop massively scalable, distributed software systems and also collaborate on multitudes of smaller projects that have universal appeal - which requires research, awareness, interactivity, and asking questions.
  
• There are 3 different roles within the Software Engineering job family:
  
  • Software Engineer: product and systems development
    
  • Software Engineer in Test: uses software design, analysis, and programming skills to create innovative automated test systems
    
  • Site Reliability Engineer: creates robust and scalable software that scale to tens of millions of users.
    

• Works on guiding products from conception to design through launch, defining product vision and strategy, understanding and analyzing user needs, and researching the competitive market.
  
• Read more about the APM role in our Young Innovators @ Google series
  

• Works on providing direct support for Linux, Mac and Microsoft desktops/laptops and user access to corporate network and applications. ITRs also provides direct support for services such as office phones, video conferencing, and remote access. They’re also responsible for troubleshooting of Google’s corporate resources and applications and supporting Google’s office relocations and expansions.
  
• Learn more from some of the IT residents themselves here.
  

• Conduct independent research on multiple aspects of how users experience online search.
  
• Work with designers, product managers, engineers, and research managers to prioritize research opportunities in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.
• Look out for future stories about this role on the Google Students blog
  

• User interface design for new and existing Google products and features
  
• Develops high level and detailed storyboards, mockups and prototypes
  
• Must have design portfolio to apply
  
• Look out for future stories about this role on the Google Students blog
  

• We’re still keeping your private information private -- we’re not changing the visibility of any information you have stored with Google.
• We’re still allowing you to do searches, watch videos on YouTube, get driving directions on Google Maps, and perform other tasks without signing into a Google Account.
• We’re still offering you choice and control through privacy tools like Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager that help you understand and manage your data.
• We still won’t sell your personal information to advertisers.
• We’re still offering data liberation if you’d prefer to close your Google Account and take your data elsewhere.

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.
• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.
• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.
• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

[This post is by Reto Meier, Android Developer Relations Tech Lead. — Tim Bray]

I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved with Android since the 0.9 preview SDK was released to developers back in 2007. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that hasn’t is the rapid pace at which new tools, resources, and information have become available for us Android developers. Just look at the last few months.

In December Android Training launched, with its first set of classes designed to demonstrate the best practices behind building great Android Apps.

Earlier this month, the Android design site went live — offering a place to learn about the principles, building blocks, and patterns you need to make good design decisions when creating your Android app interfaces.

We’ve got a lot more planned in the coming year, so to help you keep abreast of all the latest Android developer news we’re launching the +Android Developers page on Google+!

One of my favourite things about Google+ is the quality of conversation around posts, so +Android Developers will focus on being a place for the people behind the Android developer experience, and Android developers all around the world, to meet and discuss the latest in Android app development.

We’ll be posting development tips, discussing updates to the SDK and developer tools, highlighting new Android training classes, and posting video and pics from Android developer events around the world.

We’ll also be using Google+ Hangouts to help us all interact even more closely. Starting with weekly broadcast office-hours on Hangouts On Air to answer Android development questions. These will happen every Wednesday at 2pm Pacific Time (10pm UTS) in Mountain View—expect to see these hangouts in more time zones as our teams in London, Sydney, and Tokyo get involved. Each hangout will be recorded for YouTube, so if you can’t join us live you won’t miss out.

It turns out that hangouts are a lot of fun, so we’ll be doing more of these that feature interviews with Google engineers and 3rd party Android app developers willing to share their tips and experiences.

We’re looking forward to interacting with you even more closely, so add us to your circles, join the conversation by commenting on posts, and join the hangouts. We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.
• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.
• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.
• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

Last year, we were excited about the effort initiated by the U.S. government to promote cloud adoption through the Cloud First initiative. Through this initiative, the federal government declared that taxpayers' money should be used in a more productive way, and having the government run its own data centers (more than 2,000 of them) didn't make sense. They’ve targeted the shutdown of more than 1,000 in what they call their “year of change in federal IT,” saving more than $2 billion in taxpayer money. Through leading by example, the federal government went Google with several large agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Government Services Agency (GSA). They join other public entities like the states of Wyoming, and Utah, Washington DC, and the cities of Orlando and Pittsburgh. Also, quasi-public entities have embraced Google Apps, including more than 61 of the top 100 U.S. universities.

In 2012, we hope to see the same movement in Europe. On January 26th, the European Commission's Vice President Neelie Kroes announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos the European Cloud Partnership, and they're backing it with an investment of 10 million EUR to create "a strong common basis for cloud procurement by public authorities." Commissioner Kroes also addressed many of the concerns about local clouds in a decisive way:

“There is one thing that does not make sense and I want to be clear about it: The Cloud Partnership, and indeed our overall Cloud Computing strategy, is not about building a European super-cloud, neither outright nor by forcing the integration of existing public cloud infrastructures. Cloud business models, and the set-up of cloud suppliers' and publicly-run data centres, should be determined by efficiency considerations on the market.”

We believe that the European Cloud Partnership will be a positive thing for public authorities, not just in Europe, but around the world. According to recent studies, the Internet already accounts on average for 3.4% of GDP in a group of 13 emerging and developed economies, helps to spur economic growth and initiatives like this will help to promote its positive economic impact further.

• You still have choice and control. You don’t need to log in to use many of our services, including Search, Maps and YouTube. If you are logged in, you can still edit or turn off your Search history, switch Gmail chat to “off the record,” control the way Google tailors ads to your interests, use Incognito mode on Chrome, or use any of the other privacy tools we offer.
• We’re not collecting more data about you. Our new policy simply makes it clear that we use data to refine and improve your experience on Google — whichever products or services you use. This is something we have already been doing for a long time.
• We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it. Period.
• You can use as much or as little of Google as you want. For example, you can have a Google Account and choose to use Gmail, but not use Google+. Or you could keep your data separate with different accounts -- for example, one for YouTube and another for Gmail.

[This post is by Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com. — Tim Bray]

Before Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), all Android-powered devices included a dedicated Menu button. As a developer, you could use the Menu button to display whatever options were relevant to the user, often using the activity’s built-in options menu. Honeycomb removed the reliance on physical buttons, and introduced the ActionBar class as the standard solution to make actions from the user options immediately visible and quick to invoke. In order to provide the most intuitive and consistent user experience in your apps, you should migrate your designs away from using the Menu button and toward using the action bar. This isn’t a new concept — the action bar pattern has been around on Android even before Honeycomb — but as Ice Cream Sandwich rolls out to more devices, it’s important that you begin to migrate your designs to the action bar in order to promote a consistent Android user experience.

You might worry that it’s too much work to begin using the action bar, because you need to support versions of Android older than Honeycomb. However, it’s quite simple for most apps because you can continue to support the Menu button on pre-Honeycomb devices, but also provide the action bar on newer devices with only a few lines of code changes.

If I had to put this whole post into one sentence, it’d be: Set targetSdkVersion to 14 and, if you use the options menu, surface a few actions in the action bar with showAsAction="ifRoom".

Don’t call it a menu

Not only should your apps stop relying on the hardware Menu button, but you should stop thinking about your activities using a “menu button” at all. Your activities should provide buttons for important user actions directly in the action bar (or elsewhere on screen). Those that can’t fit in the action bar end up in the action overflow.

In the screenshot here, you can see an action button for Search and the action overflow on the right side of the action bar.

Even if your app is built to support versions of Android older than 3.0 (in which apps traditionally use the options menu panel to display user options/actions), when it runs on Android 3.0 and beyond, there’s no Menu button. The button that appears in the system/navigation bar represents the action overflow for legacy apps, which reveals actions and user options that have “overflowed off the screen.”

This might seem like splitting hairs over terminology, but the name action overflow promotes a different way of thinking. Instead of thinking about a menu that serves as a catch-all for various user options, you should think more about which user options you want to display on the screen as actions. Those that don't need to be on the screen can overflow off the screen. Users can reveal the overflow and other options by touching an overflow button that appears alongside the on-screen action buttons.

Action overflow button for legacy apps

If you’ve already developed an app to support Android 2.3 and lower, then you might have noticed that when it runs on a device without a hardware Menu button (such as a Honeycomb tablet or Galaxy Nexus), the system adds the action overflow button beside the system navigation.

This is a compatibility behavior for legacy apps designed to ensure that apps built to expect a Menu button remain functional. However, this button doesn’t provide an ideal user experience. In fact, in apps that don’t use an options menu anyway, this action overflow button does nothing and creates user confusion. So you should update your legacy apps to remove the action overflow from the navigation bar when running on Android 3.0+ and begin using the action bar if necessary. You can do so all while remaining backward compatible with the devices your apps currently support.

If your app runs on a device without a dedicated Menu button, the system decides whether to add the action overflow to the navigation bar based on which API levels you declare to support in the <uses-sdk> manifest element. The logic boils down to:

• If you set either minSdkVersion or targetSdkVersion to 11 or higher, the system will not add the legacy overflow button.

• Otherwise, the system will add the legacy overflow button when running on Android 3.0 or higher.

• The only exception is that if you set minSdkVersion to 10 or lower, set targetSdkVersion to 11, 12, or 13, and you do not use ActionBar, the system will add the legacy overflow button when running your app on a handset with Android 4.0 or higher.

That exception might be a bit confusing, but it’s based on the belief that if you designed your app to support pre-Honeycomb handsets and Honeycomb tablets, it probably expects handset devices to include a Menu button (but it supports tablets that don’t have one).

So, to ensure that the overflow action button never appears beside the system navigation, you should set the targetSdkVersion to 14. (You can leave minSdkVersion at something much lower to continue supporting older devices.)

Migrating to the action bar

If you have activities that use the options menu (they implement onCreateOptionsMenu()), then once the legacy overflow button disappears from the system/navigation bar (because you’ve set targetSdkVersion to 14), you need to provide an alternative means for the user to access the activity’s actions and other options. Fortunately, the system provides such a means by default: the action bar.

Add showAsAction="ifRoom" to the <item> elements representing the activity’s most important actions to show them in the action bar when space is available. For help deciding how to prioritize which actions should appear in the action bar, see Android Design’s Action Bar guide.

To further provide a consistent user experience in the action bar, we suggest that you use action icons designed by the Android UX Team where appropriate. The available icons support common user actions such as Refresh, Delete, Attach, Star, Share and more, and are designed for the light and dark Holo themes. Here they are!

If these icons don’t accommodate your needs and you need to create your own, you should follow the Iconography design guide.

Removing the action bar

If you don’t need the action bar, you can remove it from your entire app or from individual activities. This is appropriate for apps that never used the options menu or for apps in which the action bar doesn’t meet design needs (such as games). You can remove the action bar using a theme such as Theme.Holo.NoActionBar or Theme.DeviceDefault.NoActionBar.

In order to use such a theme and remain backward compatible, you can use Android’s resource system to define different themes for different platform versions, as described by Adam Powell’s post, Holo Everywhere. All you need is your own theme, which you define to inherit different platform themes depending on the current platform version.

For example, here’s how you can declare a custom theme for your application:

<application android:theme="@style/NoActionBar">

Or you can instead declare the theme for individual <activity> elements.

For pre-Honeycomb devices, include the following theme in res/values/themes.xml that inherits the standard platform theme:

<resources>
    <style name="NoActionBar" parent="@android:style/Theme">
        <!-- Inherits the default theme for pre-HC (no action bar) -->
    </style>
</resources>

For Honeycomb and beyond, include the following theme in res/values-v11/themes.xml that inherits a NoActionBar theme:

<resources>
    <style name="NoActionBar" parent="@android:style/Theme.Holo.NoActionBar">
        <!-- Inherits the Holo theme with no action bar; no other styles needed. -->
    </style>
</resources>

At runtime, the system applies the appropriate version of the NoActionBar theme based on the system’s API version.

Summary

• Android no longer requires a dedicated Menu button, some devices don’t have one, and you should migrate away from using it.

• Set targetSdkVersion to 14, then test your app on Android 4.0.

• Add showAsAction="ifRoom" to menu items you’d like to surface in the action bar.

• If the ActionBar doesn’t work for your app, you can remove it with Theme.Holo.NoActionBar or Theme.DeviceDefault.NoActionBar.

For information about how you should design your action bar, see Android Design’s Action Bar guide. More information about implementing the action bar is also available in the Action Bar developer guide.

Curviloft lets you do three basic operations; which one you use depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. For the sake of brevity (and simplicity), I’m going to focus on only the first operation in this post: Loft By Spline.

The Basics

Let’s say you have two profiles that you want to connect together. The example below is super-simple: It’s a circle directly above a square. Here, I want to connect the two with a shape that goes directly between them. Curviloft’s Loft By Spline tool was made for just this kind of thing.

I start with two flat profiles (shapes) positioned one above the other.

With nothing selected, I activate Loft By Spline and click once on each shape. Because there are only two, it doesn’t matter which shape I click first. If there were more than two, I’d click in the order that I want to connect them, starting at either end. When both profiles are numbered, I click the green checkmark in the Curviloft toolbar (see below). This brings me into Preview mode, where I can see what I’m about to end up with.

The Curviloft toolbar is complicated; there’s no getting around it. The good news is that you don’t have to understand what all the controls do in order to use the tool. In Preview mode, you can just click things to see what happens. There's no shame in experimentation.

The Curviloft toolbar is a doozy, but you can (and should) click buttons to see what happens. Every case is different, and some settings look better than others.

When you perform a Loft by Spline operation with Curviloft, the tool is generating two different kinds of geometry which it later combines. Intermediate profiles (left) are "in-between" 2D shapes spaced between the profiles you start out with. Splines (right) are lines that connect adjacent profiles together. They can be straight or curvy, depending on the settings you choose.

I like to fiddle with the Spline Method settings first (see below). This is where you control the shape of the vertical lines (splines) that connect the two profiles—in this case, the circle and the square. The three options that I find give the most interesting results are “Junction by connected lines”, “Bezier curves – Respect tangency (Method 2)” and “Junction by Orthogonal Bezier Curves”. By all means, try the other buttons, too; there’s gold in them thar hills.

Playing with the Vertex Matching controls also yields some useful options (see below). Here, you’re telling Curviloft how to decide which points on the perimeter of each profile should connect to one another. In this case, the circle has 24 endpoints and the circle only has four. The tool does its best to figure out the intermediate geometry, but the Vertex Matching settings let you provide guidance. For me, the most interesting button is the one on the far right; often, deselecting “Orientate contours to their best-fit box” seems to produce better results. Click it a few times to see what happens.

When you’re satisfied, hit Enter on your keyboard (or click the green checkmark on the toolbar) to finish generating the result.

While you’re still in Preview mode, clicking on black part of your preview object opens yet another set of controls. The Properties of the Edited Junction window shows you more information about the connections in the operation you’re doing. My favorite widgets here have to do with twisting; they let you rotate either of your profiles (in this case, the circle and the square) by 15 or 90 degree increments. The result is an insanely cool twisting effect. Click the little right and left arrows and you’ll see what I mean. Addictive, no?

Loft by Spline works great on profiles that aren’t lined up perfectly, too. Below, I’ve moved and rotated the circle.

Again, trying different Spline Method settings produces pretty wildly different results.

I've written about a couple of Fredo6's other terrific plugins in the past. RoundCorner gives you the ability to quickly and easily create rounds and fillets on almost any shape. FredoScale is a toolkit for stretching, bending, twisting and otherwise deforming your models in incredibly useful ways.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist

We're taking bird's eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+.

A seamless globe
The Google Earth globe is made from a mosaic of satellite and aerial photographs taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. Because of this variance, views of the Earth from high altitude can sometimes appear patchy.

Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.

Google Earth is a great way to virtually explore the globe, whether revisiting old haunts or checking out a future vacation spot. With the Google Earth 6.2 update, we’ve added the option to share a screenshot of your current view in Google Earth through Google+. If you’ve already upgraded to Google+, you can share images of the places you’ve virtually traveled to with your Circles, such as family, friends or your local hiking club. To try this new feature, simply sign in to your Google Account in the upper right hand corner of Google Earth and click “Share.” Images of mountains, oceans, deserts, 3D cities, your favorite pizza shop on Street View—you can now experience all these amazing places around the world with people on Google+.
Search improvements

We’ve also made some updates to the search feature in Google Earth. Aside from streamlining the visual design of the search panel, we’ve enabled the same Autocomplete feature that’s available on Google Maps. We’ve also introduced search layers, which will show all the relevant search results (not just the top ten), so now, when looking for gelato in Milano, you can see all the tasty possibilities. Finally, we’ve added biking, transit and walking directions, so if you’re itching for a change of scenery or looking for a new route for your regular commute, you can now use Google Earth to generate and visualize all your options.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth