Announcing the Android 1.0 SDK, release 1

About this time last year, my colleagues and I were preparing for the first of the "early look" SDK releases. I remember being a little freaked out—November 12 was starting to sound awfully close! But I think I can safely speak for the entire Android team when I say that we were all very excited about that upcoming release. In the year since, we've run and concluded the first Android Developer Challenge, given away $5,000,000, released more SDK builds,...

Panoramio

The Panoramio web site has a great collection of photos from all over the world, and they also have a very convenient web API. I thought it would be a lot of fun to use Android to access this content while you are out walking around – and especially to have Android find interesting photos based on your current location. The resulting open source application is now available in the apps-for-android...

Using WebViews

I've written a small application called WebViewDemo that shows how you can add web content to your application. You can find it in the apps-for-android project. This application demonstrates how you can embed a WebView into an activity and also how you can have two way communication between your application and the web content. A WebView uses the same rendering and JavaScript engine as the browser,...

Divide and Conquer

Years ago I was addicted to a simple game that I played on my then state-of-the-art Pentium-75. In this game, balls would bounce around, and I would try to partition them into small enough spaces so that I could go to the next level where more and more balls would be added. As of a couple of months ago, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of this game. So when I sat down to write an...

Three new Samples: Triangle, SpriteText and Downloader

I've posted three new open source samples to the apps-for-android project: Triangle, SpriteText and Downloader.The first two samples, Triangle and SpriteText, show techniques that would be useful to anyone using the OpenGL ES 3D graphics APIs to write Android applications. The samples contain several reusable classes that may eventually be incorporated (in some form) into the SDK. Chief among these...

Android Photostream

I'm pleased to announce that a new open source sample application—called Photostream—has been added to the apps-for-android project. Photostream is a simple photos browser and viewer for Flickr. All you need to use it is a Flickr screen name or user name (the application offers a default user name if you just want to try it.)This application serves as an illustrative example of several Android features...