Heading for GDC

[This post is by Chris Pruett, who writes regularly about games here, and is obviously pretty cranked about this conference. — Tim Bray]Android will descend in force upon the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week; we’re offering a full day packed with sessions covering everything you need to know to build games on Android.From 10 AM to 5 PM on Tuesday the 1st, North...

Animation in Honeycomb

[This post is by Chet Haase, an Android engineer who specializes in graphics and animation, and who occasionally posts videos and articles on these topics on his CodeDependent blog at graphics-geek.blogspot.com. — Tim Bray]One of the new features ushered in with the Honeycomb release is a new animation system, a set of APIs in a whole new package (android.animation) that makes animating...

Best Practices for Honeycomb and Tablets

The first tablets running Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be hitting the streets on Thursday Feb. 24th, and we’ve just posted the full SDK release. We encourage you to test your applications on the new platform, using a tablet-size AVD.Developers who’ve followed the Android Framework’s guidelines and best practices will find their apps work well on Android 3.0. This purpose of this post is to provide reminders of and links to those best practices.Moving...

Final Android 3.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools

We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers. The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11.For an overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.Together with the new platform, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools...

Introducing Renderscript

[This post is by R. Jason Sams, an Android engineer who specializes in graphics, performance tuning, and software architecture. —Tim Bray]Renderscript is a key new Honeycomb feature which we haven’t yet discussed in much detail. I will address this in two parts. This post will be a quick overview of Renderscript. A more detailed technical post with a simple example will be provided later.Renderscript...

Android 2.3.3 Platform, New NFC Capabilities

Several weeks ago we released Android 2.3, which introduced several new forms of communication for developers and users. One of those, Near Field Communications (NFC), let developers get started creating a new class of contactless, proximity-based applications for users.NFC is an emerging technology that promises exciting new ways to use mobile devices, including ticketing, advertising, ratings, and even data exchange with other devices. We know...

The Android 3.0 Fragments API

[This post is by Dianne Hackborn, a Software Engineer who sits very near the exact center of everything Android. — Tim Bray]An important goal for Android 3.0 is to make it easier for developers to write applications that can scale across a variety of screen sizes, beyond the facilities already available in the platform:Since the beginning, Android’s UI framework has been designed around...

New Merchandising and Billing Features on Android Market

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]Following on last week’s announcement of the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, I’d like to share some more good news with you about three important new features on Android Market.Android Market on the WebStarting today, we have extended Android Market client from mobile devices to every desktop. Anyone can now easily find and share applications...