Developer News

For no particular reason other than to celebrate this particular Monday, I wanted to update developers on two Android-related news items.If you're a developer who will be in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of May, I hope you'll join us at the 2009 Google I/O developer conference. You might have already seen the sessions we had listed for Android, but today I'm quite pleased to let you know that we've added a few more Android-related sessions....

Android Layout Tricks #3: Optimize with stubs

Sharing and reusing layouts is very easy with Android thanks to the <include /> tag, sometimes even too easy and you might end up with user interfaces that contain a large number of views, some of which are rarely used. Thankfully, Android offers a very special widget called ViewStub, which brings you all the benefits of the <include /> without polluting your user interface with rarely...

Software Update Available for the Android Developer Phone

Back in December, the Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1) went on sale, giving developers access to unlocked hardware for their work. A few weeks ago, consumers with retail devices received an over the air update with the 1.1 release of Android. I know that many developers will be pleased to hear that today, our colleagues at HTC have released a 1.1 version of Android for the Android Dev Phone which you can install on your device. If you have questions about...

Window Backgrounds & UI Speed

Some Android applications require to squeeze every bit of performance out of the UI toolkit and there are many ways to do so. In this article, you will discover how to speed up the drawing and the perceived startup time of your activities. Both these techniques rely on a single feature, the window's background drawable.The term window background is a bit misleading however. When you setup your user...

Android Layout Tricks #3: Optimize by merging

In the previous installment of Android Layout Tricks, I showed you how to use the <include /> tag in XML layout to reuse and share your layout code. I also mentioned the <merge /> and it's now time to learn how to use it.The <merge /> was created for the purpose of optimizing Android layouts by reducing the number of levels in view trees. It's easier to understand the problem this...