02
Oct
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Google Working On New Android Build System To Replace, Unify Eclipse's ADT And Ant – Devs Can Try It Now

Posted by in Android OS, Development, News

Looking to create a more versatile and powerful build system for Android developers, Google has been working on what is currently called "New Build System," a tool that aims to (one day) replace, unify, and build upon the functionality of Eclipse's ADT and Ant build systems.

While the new build system is still in very early stages (just reaching build 0.1 today) and not yet ready to build ship-able apps, it's already proving useful. Our own Artem cites the ability to build both dev and production versions of apps simultaneously and the ability to use the same build process between ADT and Linux as signs that the project is already showing great potential.

30
Jun
2012-06-30_10h17_53

[Update: Winners!] Book Giveaway: Win One Of Ten Copies Of Android Apps With Eclipse

Posted by in Contests / Giveaways, Development
Last Updated: July 10th, 2012

The contest is now over. Here are the winners, selected at random:
  • Danny Holyoake
  • Zhe Xi Ooi
  • Marc Zdon
  • Dennis F Heffernan   
  • Melvin Blokhuijzen   
  • Pegasus195   
  • Raido   
  • Sirdeiu   
  • Justin  
  • Brett Glisson

Congratulations - you will be contacted for your information in the near future!

Everyone else - keep participating and stay tuned to Android Police so that you don't miss our upcoming giveaway announcements. You can follow AP on Twitter Facebook, Google+, and RSS.

There are a lot of integrated development environments out there, and when it comes to Android, Eclipse is one of the most popular. As always, Apress has every budding developer's back with a book written specifically for getting people up and running on the IDE.

28
Jun
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[Video] Android Developer Gold: Multi-Configuration Editing, Along With Numerous New Improvements, Coming Soon To Android Developers' Tools

Posted by in Development, News, Videos

The Android developers' tools team, headed by the usual suspects Xavier Ducrohet and Tor Norbye, led a session at I/O 2012 today dedicated to improvements and new features coming to the tools devs use to make apps - ADT for Eclipse and SDK Tools.

Everything they showed took around an hour of nonstop talking, arm flailing, and cracking jokes about the French, but among all the new goodies one prominently stood out - multi-configuration editing. The developer in me got incredibly excited and wished this tool was available years ago, because the potential time savings it brings are immense.

Basically, multi-configuration editing is a way to visualize your layout on multiple configurations at once.

14
Jun
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LG Confirms In Bluetooth SIG That Quad-Core Krait E970 / LS970 Headed To North America This Fall

Posted by in AT&T, LG, News, Rogers, Rumors, Sprint
Last Updated: June 15th, 2012

In a Bluetooth SIG listing (a trade certification group), LG has officially confirmed the existence of the E970 and LS970. The former is possibly headed for AT&T (it has AT&T GSM and LTE bands - which could mean Rogers as well) and is packing a quad-core Qualcomm S4 Krait chip, complete with the latest Adreno 320 GPU goes toe-for-toe with the Galaxy SIII in GLBencmark. The 1280x768 resolution is something of an oddity - why the extra 48 pixels? A 13MP rear camera and 2GB of RAM round of this beefy device's specs. It's actually quite similar to the upcoming Optimus LTE2, so we could be seeing a carrier-specific iteration of that hardware here.

22
Dec
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[Update: Now With ICS Source] Gold For Android Developers: Add AOSP Source Code To Eclipse With The "Android Sources" Plugin

Posted by in Android OS, Cupcake 1.5, Development, Donut 1.6, Eclair 2.1, Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread 2.3, Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, Tips & Tutorials

As an Android developer, the first thing I do when I set up Eclipse with ADT on a new machine is hunt down the Android source for the API level I'm working on.

Earlier this month, I added a request for Android 4.0 source to be added to the plugin, and I'm pleased to report that the plugin maintainer just added it to the latest version.

Honeycomb sources are being worked on.

Note: If you already have the plugin installed, you'll need to re-install for this addition to show up.

Developers should understand what I'm talking about, but for the rest of you - this priceless little addition to our development process means whenever we want to see just what exactly Android is doing at a certain point in our programs, we can actually take a peek.

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.

27
Oct
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For Developers: Android SDK Tools r15 And ADT 15 Bug Fixers Now Available

Posted by in Android OS, Development, News

The Android 4.0 API that was released together with the unveiling of the Galaxy Nexus also brought us, developers, ADT 14 and SDK Tools r14, which quite a few people started having problems with almost immediately. The tools were released in an incomplete state based on my experience with ADT 14-preview, as some serious and known bugs weren't fixed when 14-final came out. I have a feeling the ICS event kind forced the corresponding ADT/tools 14 release and prompted Google to roll it out in what I consider a broken state (many reported crashes, broken Logcat, etc).

Thankfully, the tools team (hi, Tor and Xav!) persistently worked on the issues and just released ADT 15 and SDK Tools 15, brining much relief to those of us experiencing said problems (the un-pausable scrolling Logcat was killing me in the last few weeks).

15
Dec
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For Developers: Live On The Edge - Upgrade To The Latest Eclipse ADT (Currently v9.0.0) Before It Is Released [How-To]

Posted by in Android OS, Development, Gingerbread 2.3, News, Tips & Tutorials

We, Android developers, spend our days staring at a computer screen, most likely at one of Eclipse's windows. Eclipse is an amazing IDE in theory, but it never quite feels complete and polished, mostly due to the fact that it's powered by open source enthusiasts and is based almost entirely on plugins (if you want to get it to do anything useful, that is).

Being Android developers, the plugin we are using every day is ADT - Android Development Tools, written by Google engineers, mostly @tornorbye and @droidxav who I've been conversing over twitter lately and annoying with filing numerous ADT bugs (hi, if you're reading!).

06
Dec
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[Updated] Google Announces 2.3 Gingerbread! Here Is Everything You Need To Know

Posted by in Gingerbread 2.3, News
Last Updated: December 10th, 2010

The moment we've been waiting for so many months - it's finally here! I can hardly contain my excitement as I'm writing this, but both Gingerbread and the Samsung Nexus S were officially announced 30 minutes ago. As expected, the new OS bears the version number 2.3 and brings updates to the SDK and the NDK as well SDK tools and the Eclipse ADT plugin.

As expected, a lot of the OS improvements are under-the-hood, which will result in better gaming, responsiveness, and overall Android experience.

New Features/Enhancements

OS/SDK/NDK

The new OS features and enhancements include:

  • enhancements for game development, including a new concurrent garbage collector, more native APIs, faster event distribution, updated video drivers, and new sensors (gyroscope) - this is amazing for developers; expect gaming to get a lot more responsive and versatile
  • lots and lots of attention in the above bullet point has been given to the NDK - the Native Development Kit.

09
Nov
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For Android Developers: Next Version Of Eclipse ADT To Include Auto Formatting Of XML

Posted by in Development, Gingerbread 2.3, News

I was browsing the Android commit tree, as I like to do at 3:20am sometimes, and I just saw a new commit by Tor Norbye with the following description that made my heart skip a beat: "Add autoformatting of XML." This little update may not mean much to the regular folks, but to Android developers, like myself, this has been a long requested feature.

About a year ago, I wrote this article: Auto Formatting Android XML Files With Eclipse, which described how easy it is to achieve uniform, formatted XML files in Eclipse while doing Android development. Since XML files comprise a very large portion of an average Android project (the whole app layout is XML based), keeping XML files tidy becomes a very important, but mundane task.

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