Android Layout Tricks #2: Reusing layouts

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 complex widget made of several simple stock widgets. You could for instance reuse a panel containing a progress bar and a cancel button, a panel containing two buttons (positive and negative actions),...

Android Layout Tricks #1

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 most efficient way to create user interfaces. A common example is the abuse of LinearLayout, which leads to a proliferation of views in the view hierarchy....

Android Market update: priced applications for US users

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. Once the service is enabled on their devices, T-Mobile G1 users will be able to see the priced apps immediately without the need to reboot. For more details...

Faster screen orientation change

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 keyboard, the screen change from the portrait orientation to the landscape orientation. To make Android applications development easier, the OS automatically...

Android Market update: support for priced applications

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 end user pricing for the apps. Initially, priced applications will be available to end users in the US starting mid next week. We will add end user...

Track memory allocations

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 can sometimes cause performance issues if you are not careful with memory allocations.In a performance sensitive code path, like the layout or drawing...

Apps that work together

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 song via via the Amazon MP3 app. Here, the three developers behind these apps talk about how they accomplished this:To hear more about how the MySpace app for Android was built and lessons learned,...

Android 1.1 SDK, release 1 Now Available

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". Applications written with the 1.0_r1 and 1.0_r2 SDKs will continue to work just fine on Android 1.1. But if you want to take advantage of the new APIs in 1.1, you'll need an updated SDK. That's why I'm...