Hello, Stack Overflow!

Over the past year, an Android presence has been growing on a relatively new technical Q&A web site called Stack Overflow. The site was designed specifically for programmers, with features like syntax highlighting, tagging, user reputation, and community editing. It's attracted a loyal software developer community, and developers continue to express great praise for this new tool. Well, the Android team has been listening...and we agree.Today,...

Back and other hard keys: three stories

Android 2.0 introduces new behavior and support for handling hard keys such as BACK and MENU, including some special features to support the virtual hard keys that are appearing on recent devices such as Droid.This article will give you three stories on these changes: from the most simple to the gory details. Pick the one you prefer.Story 1: Making things easier for developersIf you were to survey the base applications in the Android platform, you...

New resources and sample code on developer.android.com

Hey Android developers—if you've visited the online Android SDK documentation recently, you may have noticed a few changes. That's right, there's a new Resources tab, which was designed to take some of the load off the Developer's Guide. We've moved a number of existing resources to the Resources tab, including tutorials, sample code, and FAQs. We've also formalized a few of our most popular developer...

Knowing is half the battle

As a developer, I often wonder which Android platforms my applications should support,especially as the number of Android-powered devices grows. Should my application only focus on the latest version of the platform or should it support older ones as well?To help with this kind of decision, I am excited to announce the newdevice dashboard. It provides information about deployed Android-powered devices...

Come to Our Virtual Office Hours

Starting this week, we're going to be holding regular IRC office hours for Android app developers in the #android-dev channel on irc.freenode.net. Members of the Android team will be on hand to answer your technical questions. (Note that we will not be able to provide customer support for the phones themselves.)We've arranged our office hours to accommodate as many different schedules as possible, for folks around the world. We will initially hold...

Optimize your layouts

/* Stylesheet generated from TextMate theme * * Mac Classic * * *//* Mostly to improve view within the TextMate HTML viewer */body { margin: 0; padding: 0;}pre.textmate-source { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 2px; font-family: Monaco, monospace; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.3em; word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; white-space: -o-pre-wrap;}pre.textmate-source.mac_classic { color: #000000; background-color:...

Android SDK Updates

Today we are releasing updates to multiple components of the Android SDK:Android 2.0.1, revision 1Android 1.6, revision 2SDK Tools, revision 4Android 2.0.1 is a minor update to Android 2.0. This update includes several bug fixes and behavior changes, such as application resource selection based on API level and changes to the value of some Bluetooth-related constants. For more detailed information, please see the Android 2.0.1 release notes.To differentiate...