On Android Compatibility

[This post is by Dan Morrill, Open Source & Compatibility Program Manager. — Tim Bray]At Google I/O 2010, we announced that there are over 60 Android models now, selling 100,000 units a day. When I wear my open-source hat, this is exciting: every day the equivalent of the entire population of my old home city starts using open-source software, possibly for the first time. When I put on my hat...

Android Cloud To Device Messaging

[This post is by Wei Huang, who helped implement this feature. — Tim Bray]In the just-launched Android 2.2, we’ve added a new service to help developers send data from servers to their applications on Android phones. Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) makes it easier for mobile applications to sync data with servers.Most of the useful applications on your mobile phone use the Internet to keep...

Dalvik JIT

[This post is by Dan Bornstein, virtual-machine wrangler. — Tim Bray]As the tech lead for the Dalvik team within the Android project, I spend my time working on the virtual machine (VM) and core class libraries that sit beneath the Android application framework. This layer is mostly invisible to end users, but done right, it helps make Android devices run smoothly and improves developer productivity.The...

Android Application Error Reports

[This post, the first in a series about new features in Android 2.2 ("Froyo"), is by Jacek Surazski, a Googler from our Krakow office. — Tim Bray]The upcoming release of Android will include a new bug reporting feature for Market apps. Developers will receive crash and freeze reports from their users. The reports will be available when they log into their Android Market publisher account....

Android 2.2 and developers goodies.

Today at Google I/O we announced that Android 2.2 is right around the corner. This is our seventh platform release since we launched Android 1.0 in September 2008. We wanted to highlight five areas in particular:Performance & speed: The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks.New enterprise...

The Google TV Story

Vincent Dureau, who’s in charge of Google TV, is a lean, bony-faced man with a strong French accent; not too far off my own age, I’d say. With the announcement imminent, he’s been too busy to write; I'm reporting on my talk with him to give a feel for the thinking behind the project. You’ll notice an absence of quotation marks; Vincent’s half of the conversation is reconstructed from the combination...

Latitude API Launch

Over at the Google Code Blog, there's a pretty significant announcement, about the release of APIs for Latitude. the idea, as you might expect, is that the best way to get good location-based applications is to put the tools for building them into everyone's hands.A glance at the online documentation reveals an essentially-RESTFul API with JSON payloads, which should be easy to use from an Android app. It seems likely that a device which knows its...

Stand By...

I'm posting this from Moscone West, the site of Google I/O 2010. Some things that it may be useful to know:The official hash tag is #io2010The keynotes will be live-blogged all over the place (thus, not here) and also live-streamed on YouTube.If you're mad because you couldn't get a ticket, we're sorry, but you're not alone. We have filled Moscone West to the very absolute splitting-at-the-seams...

Twitter for Android: A closer look at Android’s evolving UI patterns

[This post is by Chris Nesladek, Interaction Designer, Richard Fulcher, Interaction Designer, and Virgil Dobjanschi, Software Engineer — Tim Bray]Along with our regular updates of the Android platform, we like to build example applications that showcase best practices for UI features and behavior patterns, to help our 3rd party developers create even richer applications.For example,...

Be Careful With Content Providers

The notion of a Content Provider is central to getting things done in an Android application. This is the mechanism used to expose many of a device's data resources for retrieval and update: Contacts, media store, bookmarks, phone-call log, and so on. It’s hard to find an interesting Android app that doesn’t either use or implement (or both) a Content Provider.There’s nothing magical or terribly surprising about Content Providers - you address...

Taking the Android Show on the Road

p.billy { color: #800; } p.reto { color: #080; } p.caption {text-align: center; }[This spring, the Android Developer Relations team (where I work, too) went on the road round the world with boxes of phones, their laptops bulging with slide-ware. Here we’ve combined write-ups from Billy Rutledge (who leads the Android evangelism team at Google HQ) and Reto Meier, who has a desk in London and wrote...