To hear more about how the MySpace app for Android was built and lessons learned, watch Matt Kanninen:

Tomasz Zawada of Shazam also talks about his opinions on the Android platform and has some tips for developers building Android apps:

These and the other Android app developer videos can be found here.

• Amazed was built primarily to get familiar with the accelerometer. This helped him in his work on Guitar Hero® World Tour Mobile for Android.
• Using traceview to track down which methods take the most CPU cycles.

This and other Android developer videos can be found here.

The first is of Allan Hsu—he wrote imeem's Android app. A couple of things he mentions in his videos:

• Using SQLite databases and regular expressions
• Completing the app, including rewriting many of their Activities and web service API calls, in just 6 weeks.

The second video features Casey Langen—he wrote the Amazon MP3 for Android app. Things he mentions in the videos include:

• Using Apache HTTPClient to download data from their servers. Also used ListView in all activities and the MediaPlayer for song previews.
• Developers new to Android should get familiar with ViewGroups and how they're implemented.

Check out other Android developer videos here: Android App Developers.

To help developers better understand what's available to them, we've collected stories from some Android application developers. In the videos, you'll hear them talk about how they built their apps, their takes on the Android platform, and also some tips they want to share with other developers. I think they have a lot of insight to share about Android application development, so I hope you'll find these videos useful.

Here are the first two developers in this series:

Jeff Sharkey is an ADC finalist—he built CompareEverywhere.

Jacob Abrams is from Glu Mobile and helped to build their first Android app, Bonsai Blast.

Keep an eye on this blog, our YouTube channel, or the playlist for this series for more of these videos in the coming weeks.

But today, we're making what might just be the most exciting announcement of all: we and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There's a huge amount of code and content there, so head over to http://source.android.com/ for all the details.

I'd like to offer a huge thank you and congratulations to my colleagues and the Alliance partners for what I hope will be a red-letter day for the open source community, and openness in the mobile industry.

There are a couple of changes in m5-rc14 I'd like to highlight:

• 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 find more information about what's changed in a couple of documents that we've published. First is an overview of the changes to the Android APIs in API Changes Overview. If you want a more granular view of what's changed, an API diff between m3-rc37 and m5-rc14 is also available. Finally, Upgrading the SDK provides links to the two previously referenced documents and the release notes, as well as instructions on how to upgrade your development environment.

We still need your help in shaping the platform, so if you find issues with the Android APIs or the developer tools, please let us know through the Android Issue Tracker. If you have general comments or questions, please head on over to the Android groups to get in touch.

We're looking forward to all the applications that developers will create using this new version of the Android SDK. Of course, you can use m5-rc14 or any older version of the SDK for your Android Developers Challenge submission.

• Auto-charge - Beginning today, merchants can enable a feature to automatically charge orders that have successfully authorized for funds, and have cleared the Google Checkout fraud detection process. This setting is available in the "Settings" tab under "Preferences."
  
  
• Reconciliation report changes - The Reconciliation Reports will now show the AdWords Fee Credit as a separate line item, where previously AdWords Fee Credits were displayed on the same line item as the order. (This is shown in the "Fee Adjustment" column.) We've made this change to reflect the fact that the AdWords Fee Credit is typically applied at a different time than when the order was charged.
  
  
• Merchant order numbers - Previously, merchant order numbers associated with Google Checkout orders via the <add-merchant-order-number> command were only displayed in the Reconciliation Report. Now, if a merchant order number has been assigned to an order, it will also be displayed in the lower right corner of an invoice. Please note that your merchant order number is only available to you via the Merchant Center interface and is not displayed to buyers.
  
  
• Sandbox changes - As part of our effort to improve the Google Checkout integration experience for developers, we've changed the visual appearance of the Google Checkout Sandbox. Now, when you log into the Sandbox user interface, the background will contain a watermark to differentiate it from the production Google Checkout system. We hope this will help reduce confusion about which system you're using when you're developing against the Google Checkout API.

The Google Checkout team focuses a lot on how we can best meet the needs of both buyers and merchants, especially since these interactions are the raison d'être for this service. But there's a third constituency we aim to serve that isn't quite so apparent—namely all the developers out there working with the Google Checkout API. These are the folks who do the important work of integrating merchants' websites with the product and making available the more advanced functionality found in the API, which in turn helps expand the network of sites offering Google Checkout.

First and foremost, the epicenter for all things API-related is the Google Checkout API section of code.google.com. There, you'll find a lot of different resources including the developer's guide, sample implementation code, and our small (but growing) collection of developer's cookbook articles.

We've got a lot more developer resources planned for the coming weeks and months. If you have any thoughts about how we can improve your experience as a Google Checkout API developer, please get in touch. I'll personally read all of your suggestions, and hope to respond whenever possible.