08
May
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[For Developers] Smali / Baksmali Updated v2.0 Beta Is Out, Now Multithreaded For Your Pleasure

Posted by in Development, News

If you're in the modding and theming community, your work is about to get a bit faster, because Smali v2.0 is now in beta and firing on all cylinders. The new version brings multithreaded processing and a few tweaks to the language that should result in cleaner-looking code.

Smali and baksmali are tools for assembling and disassembling the dex format used in Android apks. It's true that tools like this can be used for less than honorable endeavors, but they are also incredibly important to activities like deodexing apps for custom themes, tweaking functionality (like forcing portrait or landscape mode), and even digging around to learn more about various apps.

08
May
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CyanogenMod 10.1 Release Candidate 1 Now Rolling Out For 40 Devices

Posted by in Development, News

Get ready to start downloading, as the CyanogenMod team has started pushing out its first release candidate for 10.1. The CM team only uses the RC moniker to describe software that is believed to be stable and reliable enough for regular daily use. If you are looking for a rock solid version of Android 4.2 for your phone, this is probably the one to get.

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The timing is no coincidence, as this lands exactly one week before a new version of Android is expected to be announced at Google I/O 2013 (probably v4.3). As with previous OS releases, the CyanogenMod team usually pushes a final RC or stable release shortly after the launch of a new version from Google, immediately before integrating the latest code base with their own modifications.

25
Apr
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[For Developers] Samsung Releases Chord SDK For Easier Peer-To-Peer Connections

Posted by in Development, News

Few things attract new users to an app more than the ability to interact with other people; gamers demand multi-player and socialites want instant photo sharing. To ease the burden of exchanging data fluidly, Samsung has released its new Chord SDK to make local peer-to-peer and group communication much easier for developers with little or no networking knowledge. It exposes features similar to Samsung's AllShare SDK, but makes it possible to broadcast data and share files with several devices at once.

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Chord automates the discovery of nearby devices and handles most of the tedious aspects of file transfer and messaging, which are built on top of the open source ZeroMQ library for high efficiency.

20
Feb
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Dandy Startup Crowdsources App Ideas, Funding, Development, And Publishing, In Closed Beta For Now

Posted by in News

So, you've got an idea for the best app never to hit Android, and you know it'll take the world by storm once you get it published. There's just one problem: you don't know Java from an Indonesian island. You could quit your job, shop around for investors, hire programming talent, and try to make it on your own. Or you could submit your app idea to Dandy and let the people decide.

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The beta service has a funding capability, but that's where the similarities to Kickstarter stop. Prospective app makers submit their idea, which then gets voted on by Dandy members.

05
Feb
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Ouya Will Be Sold At GameStop, Best Buy, Target, And Amazon, Controllers Will Cost $50

Posted by in News

We've only got about a month left before Ouya units start landing in the hands of backers and a few months before the full-blown retail launch. A  retail launch that we now learn will include GameStop, Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and an undisclosed number of other sellers. Yes, including brick-and-mortar stores. Things are starting to look pretty good for the little console that could.

Speaking in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Ouya's CEO released a few extra details, including the price: $100 for the console, which we knew. However, controllers will also be available for $50. Note the distinct lack of the word "extra" before "controllers." You see, the touchpad-enabled handheld can be adapted for use on other devices.

09
Oct
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Here's What's New In Android 4.1.2 At The Low Level [Developer Commit Logs]

Posted by in Development, Jelly Bean 4.1, News

As a developer, I absolutely love days like today. If the high-level "improves performance and stability and fixes bugs" changelog of Android 4.1.2 isn't good enough for you, how about we dive into the actual low-level source code commit logs Android engineers made into AOSP since 4.1.1_r1.1 (JRO03D) all the way through today's release 4.1.2_r1 (JZO54K). These commit logs are spread over probably 100+ repositories, so hunting for all of them manually would probably take you days. However, thanks to Al Sutton, you can check them out all in one place.

Be prepared for lots of code jargon and incomplete git commit messages, which probably won't mean much to most of you.

18
Apr
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[For Developers] ADT 20/SDK Tools r20 Previews Are Here - Brand New Property Editor(!), NDK Support, Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes Galore

Posted by in Development, News

As an Android developer, I like to keep tabs on the tools I use every day, especially ones as important as ADT for Eclipse and SDK Tools. As was the case several times before, the Android team in charge of both of them posted previews of upcoming releases of ADT 20 and SDK Tools r20, available for manual download ahead of the final releases.

Yup, you heard me correctly - 20, not 18 or 19. Even though the previous major release was 17, 18 followed up shortly after with some minor changes, and 19, even more minor, wasn't even posted to the downloads page (see here for the reason).

23
Feb
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For Developers: ADT 17 And SDK Tools r17 Previews Available For Download, Now With Network Usage, Fixed Proguard, Enhanced Lint, And More

Posted by in Development, News

In preparation for the upcoming final releases, the Android team today released ADT 17-preview (Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse) and SDK Tools r17-preview with the following improvements that eager developers can try out without waiting any longer.

What's New

Out of all the additions and changes, I'm mostly excited about the new network usage tool, the fix for the dreaded "Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1" error when trying to use Proguard (oh, how many hours I wasted on this one), and the end to default ids for various layout elements. Sweet deal.

Here's the full changelog:

New Features

  • DDMS can now show the live detailed network usage of an app (More Info)
  • ProGuard
    • Bundled ProGuard updated to version 4.7.

16
Dec
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The Android Team Launches Online Android Training - Free Classes With Lessons And Sample Code For All

Posted by in Development, News

In order to make it easier for Android developers to get started with creating robust applications, the Android team today formalized and unified various coding tutorials into one clearly defined area of the Android dev site: Android Training. The tutorials, or classes, are very well put together, with splits into logical steps to make them flow well, along with sample code you can utilize to "do your homework." There is no fee for taking any of them - think of Android Training as a collection of well organized and curated tutorials.

imageI counted 11 general sections with 34 distinct lessons, and this number is going to be increasing in the future.

15
Nov
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Developer Goodies: Eclipse ADT 16/Tools r16 Will Introduce Android Lint To Help You Automatically Catch Those Pesky Errors Early

Posted by in Development, News

To help Android developers automate some things and catch certain errors early on, the Android Tools team is pushing ahead with a new dev tool called Android Lint. Android Lint will be available in the next release of ADT (16) and Tools (r16).

If you're not familiar with the "lint" paradigm, a lint tool generally helps you validate your code using a certain set of rules in order to avoid common pitfalls. For example, PHP has PHPLint, JSON has jsonlint and so on.

As for Android Lint, its features at launch will include the following:

  • Missing translations (and unused translations)
  • Layout performance problems (all the issues the old layoutopt tool used to find, and more)
  • Unused resources
  • Inconsistent array sizes (when arrays are defined in multiple configurations)
  • Accessibility and internationalization problems (hardcoded strings, missing contentDescription, etc)
  • Icon problems (like missing densities, duplicate icons, wrong sizes, etc)
  • Usability problems (like not specifying an input type on a text field)
  • Manifest errors
  • and many more

You can find all the current checks Android Lint performs here.

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