On the Road with Android

This week finds me at the Google offices in jolly old London after a quick dash out to Belgium last week. I have had the chance to meet the Mobile developers based here in London and give them an introduction to Android, as well as do the same for 70ish external developers from the London area. It has been a fun week of Android hackathons, brainstorming for Android application ideas and occasionally finding bugs and holes in the documentation.It...

Life can be tough; here are a few SDK improvements to make it a little easier

It's been just over a month since we gave developers the first early peek at the Android SDK. We've been hard at work since then on some nifty new stuff we think you'll really like. We hope to show that to you soon, but in the meantime, we wanted to fix some of the important issues you've raised. We're very pleased to announce the immediate availability of m3-rc37a. (What a great name for a droid!)Our servers are quivering in anticipation of the...

Google Developer Podcast: Android

Dianne Hackborn and Jason Parks are two of the architects on the Android engineering team, and in this podcast they talk to us about the Android platform from a technical perspective.Dianne and Jason share a background at both Be and PalmSource, and talk about how that experience has been applied to Android. Other topics covered include: Some history behind the project The high level architecture...

A Maze of Twisty Little Passages

The end of last week was Thanksgiving in the US, the tradition is to be with family, eat too much food and watch football (not necessarily in that order).Apparently some folks took the chance to work on Android projects too. We are highlighting a few of the projects that caught our eye.One of the coming of age rituals of any new platform is the porting of the Z-machine – the interpreter used in the...

A Stitch in Time

Background: While developing my first useful (though small) application for Android, which was a port of an existing utility I use when podcasting, I needed a way of updating a clock displayed on the UI at regular intervals, but in a lightweight and CPU efficient way.Problem: In the original application I used java.util.Timer to update the clock, but that class is not such a good choice on Android....

Android: the first week

Wow, what a week! The response from the community on Monday's Android SDK release has been overwhelming. Our forums have been flooded and we're glad to be helping people dig in writing new applications.A handful of quick notes for this Friday evening:We've released a quick point-revision of the SDK to fix some high-priority issues. You can now download M3-RC22a and read the release notes. Don't forget to get Eclipse to update the ADT plugin.A couple...

Just show me the code

OK, you've downloaded the SDK and are now ready to build the next killer app for mobile (and maybe win some $$$ in the process ;)Activities? Intents? SimpleCursorAdapter? Huh? Hmm...how do I proceed? Well, that depends on your style. Some will want to carefully go through all the documentation top-to-bottom, while others may prefer to just dive right into code.Either path will eventually lead to the sample applications provided in the SDK — these...

This is the droid you're looking for

Following last week's announcement of the Open Handset Alliance, today we're happy to offer an early look at the Android SDK. We're eager to get feedback from lots of developers in our discussion group. We're also providing developer documentation and this blog to help you get up and going.You're probably wondering about what's available today. This preview of the SDK will allow you to develop Android applications that you can run, test, profile,...