Archives for September 2009
Version 1.6 of the Android SDK has been released to developers. Though this isn't a major release, there are quite a few tasty updates that I'm looking forward to (both as a user and a developer).
For users, updates include:
- Quick search box - The Android search mechanism has been redesigned to be able to search across multiple data sources including bookmarks, history, contacts, web, etc. It also is smart enough to bubble up the more commonly used results.
- The camera, camcorder and gallery have been simplified and made quite a bit faster than before.
- VPN support has been added.
- L2TP/IPSEC pre-shared key based VPN
- L2TP/IPsec certificate based VPN
- L2TP only VPN
- PPTP only VPN
- A bettery usage indicator which shows you how much each of your running apps is consuming so that you can stop those that kill your battery.
- Better accessibility support.
- A much improved Android Market that addresses many of the concerns that users and developers had with the market. These changes also help discoverability and doesn't hide paid apps.
For developers:
- An API to handle the expanded search framework used by then quick search box.
- A new multi-lingual text to speech engine called Pico. It allows any Android application to "speak" a string of text with an accent that matches the language, and supports English (American & British), French, Italian, German and Spanish.
- A new gestures API for creating and reusing gestures, and associating it with actions.
- Extended support for varying screen resolutions and densities. This will become more important as WVGA and QVGA devices come to market.
- Telephony support for CDMA
- A newer version of OpenCore media engine with additional codec support and improved buffering.
I came across this interesting discussion yesterday regarding WVGA supporting coming in the Donut (1.6) version of Android OS. It looks like there will be a lot of work cut out for developers because we'll need to support Cupcake (1.5) which is standardized on HVGA, and Donut which will now start supporting not only various resolutions, but also various screen densities. As developers, we'll need to consider our layouts on various screens to make sure the look their best. Thankfully, there will be some built-in support for scaling layouts and images to ease the transition.
There is a blog post being written on the topic of different screen sizes, and we have gone through round after round of work on the underlying model of the platform and how to best explain the way this works, which is
reflected in the doc.
As a side note, Al Sutton of AndAppStore.com has prepared a build of the 1.6 SDK and eclipse plugin to help test out the features coming in the next revision. We'll need all the head start we can get to implement these new features. I've played around with this a bit, and like some of the new features coming to the eclipse plugin. I'll write more about these later.
AndroLib.com is a third-party website (not run by Google) that presents a nice display of all the apps available in the Android Market. They have been crunching some statistics about what kinds of apps are available and the number of downloads they have. One interesting bit of information is that at least 25% of the apps have less than 50 downloads! Goes to show that it isn't enough to just upload your app to a mobile market and expect millions of downloads; you really need to get the word out about what you're doing, what your apps are and why people should download yours.
