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.

02
Sep
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Now We're Talking - Google's Latest Follow-up To The License Verification Fiasco Showcases 4 Methods To Make Pirates' Jobs Much Harder

Posted by in Apps/Games, Development, News

Update: Tim Bray responded in our comments letting us know Trevor Johns, a hands-on guy in the Android back-rooms, was the author of the post.

After we blew the faults behind Google's License Verification Library out of the water last week, Google's Tim Bray promised us some tips for protecting our applications against piracy, and in the latest post at Google's official Android blog he delivered them. Tim's article is loaded with easy to follow sample code, and advice that just makes sense. Mr. Bray covers several protection methods including:

  • obfuscation,
  • customizing the Licensing Library,
  • making your application tamper resistant (with a code sample that is nearly identical to what I published a week ago),
  • and using a secondary server for added protection.