Widget Design Guidelines

Since the beginning of the year, the Android UI team has been hard at work on the Android 1.5 release. Starting today with widgets, we would like to share some of our evolving Android design principles with you.Widgets are a new feature that application developers can use to promote a small sample of the most relevant dynamic data from their applications on the Home screen. We've designed widgets...

Backward compatibility for Android applications

Android 1.5 introduced a number of new features that application developers can take advantage of, like virtual input devices and speech recognition. As a developer, you need to be aware of backward compatibility issues on older devices—do you want to allow your application to run on all devices, or just those running newer software? In some cases it will be useful to employ the newer APIs on devices that support them, while continuing to support...

Android 1.5 at Google I/O

I admit, I've been talking big about Google I/O in my last few posts. But I'm entirely serious: Google I/O is going to be the Android developer event of the year, no doubt about it. I want to take a few minutes to explain why.The most exciting aspect, to my mind, is the technical content. We have 9 sessions listed now on the Google I/O sessions site, and we're working on still more. (And that's not...

Android 1.5 is here!

I've got some good news today: the Android 1.5 SDK, release 1 is ready! Grab it from the download page.For an overview of the new Android 1.5 features, see the 1.5 release notes page in our developer site.I am also happy to let you know that our partners at HTC have made available new system images to upgrade your Android Dev Phone 1 (ADP1) to Android 1.5. This new version (which is only available for the ADP1) is based on the Cupcake branch from...

Introducing GLSurfaceView

GLSurfaceView is a new API class in Android 1.5. GLSurfaceView makes OpenGL ES applications easier to write by:Providing the glue code to connect OpenGL ES to the View system.Providing the glue code to make OpenGL ES work with the Activity life-cycle.Making it easy to choose an appropriate frame buffer pixel format.Creating and managing a separate rendering thread to enable smooth animation.Providing easy-to-use debugging tools for tracing OpenGL...

Live folders

Live folders have been introduced in Android 1.5 and let you display any source of data on the Home screen without forcing the user to launch an application. A live folder is simply a real-time view of a ContentProvider. As such, a live folder can be used to display all your contacts, your bookmarks, your email, your playlists, an RSS feed, etc. The possibilities are endless! Android 1.5 ships with...

Future-Proofing Your Apps

Hi, developers! I hope you've heard about the early-look version of the Android 1.5 SDK that we recently released. There are some great new features in there, but don't get too excited yet -- some of you will need to fix some problems in your apps before you can start taking advantage of Android 1.5.We've done some fairly extensive testing of the popular apps on the Android Market, and it turns out that a few of those apps use some bad techniques...

Creating an Input Method

To create an input method (IME) for entering text into text fields and other Views, you need to extend android.inputmethodservice.InputMethodService. This API provides much of the basic implementation for an input method, in terms of managing the state and visibility of the input method and communicating with the currently visible activity.A good starting point would be the SoftKeyboard sample code...

Updating Applications for On-screen Input Methods

One of the major new features we are introducing in Android 1.5 is our Input Method Framework (IMF), which allows developers on-screen input methods such as software keyboards. This article will provide an overview of what Android input method editors (IMEs) are, and what an application developer needs to do to work well with them. The IMF allows for a new class of Android devices, such as those...

Introducing home screen widgets and the AppWidget framework

One exciting new feature in the Android 1.5 SDK is the AppWidget framework which allows developers to write "widgets" that people can drop onto their home screen and interact with. Widgets can provide a quick glimpse into full-featured apps, such as showing upcoming calendar events, or viewing details about a song playing in the background.When widgets are dropped onto the home screen, they are given...

UI framework changes in Android 1.5

On Monday, we released an early look at the Android 1.5 SDK. Not only does this platform update contain numerous new features, APIs, and bug fixes, but Android 1.5 also brings a new default look for the Android UI framework. After Android 1.0 and 1.1, our designers worked hard to refine and polish the appearance of the system. The screenshots below show the same activity (creating a new contact) on...

Getting ready for Android 1.5

I'm excited to announce that starting today, developers can get an early look at the SDK for the next version of the Android platform. This new version (which will be 1.5) is based on the cupcake branch from the Android Open Source Project. Version 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition. At the developer site, you can download...