A Deep Dive Into Location

[This post is by Reto Meier, Tech Lead for Android Developer Relations, who wrote the book on Android App development. — Tim Bray]I'm a big fan of location-based apps, but not their seemingly-inevitable startup latency. Whether it's finding a place to eat or searching for the nearest Boris Bike, I find the delay while waiting for the GPS to get a fix, and then for the results...

Things That Cannot Change

[This post is by Dianne Hackborn, whose fingerprints can be found all over the Android Application Framework — Tim Bray]Sometimes a developer will make a change to an application that has surprising results when installed as an update to a previous version — shortcuts break, widgets disappear, or it can’t even be installed at all. There are certain parts of an application...

New Editing Features in Eclipse plug-in for Android

At the Google I/O conference a month ago, we demonstrated the next version of the Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin. Today we’re happy to announce that version 11 is done and available for download!ADT 11 focuses on editor improvements. First, it offers several new visual refactoring operations, such as “Extract Include” and “Extract Style,” which help automatically extract duplicated layout...