Development - 59/86 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Jan

Notion Ink Adam Tablet Already Rooted, Market Access Unlocked

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Adam, Development, News, Notion Ink, Videos

Well, this didn't take long - the hackers over at NotionInkHacks.com played around with Notion Ink's dual-core Adam Android tablet that finally started shipping last week and already managed to root the device.

The next logical step and the primary motivation for rooting Adam was, of course, getting the absent Android Market onto the tablet. As we all know, those with almighty root privileges are not easily stopped, so I'm happy to report that full Android Market is now also available on the Adam.

This article deals with a couple of advanced topics. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms, hit up our primers here:

Rooting Explained + Top 5 Benefits Of Rooting
Top Android Apps Every Rooted User Should Know About: Part 1 (Apps 1-8), Part 2 (Apps 9-16)

Screenshots

Check out these screenshots I've taken from videos by FreezerBite1 and Inspiron41 of their rooted Adams - the first one showing the Android Market, the second one playing Dungeon Defenders installed off said Market, and the third one of Launcher Pro that replaced the Eden UI (good riddance, in my opinion - I've always thought of it as too crude and poorly designed):

Videos

And here are the aforementioned videos:

Rooting + Market Instructions

Here are the latest available instructions, as per this NotionInkHacks post.

Jan

Android Team Acknowledges Honeycomb Emulator Performance Problems, Hard At Work On Fixes

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News

The Honeycomb SDK preview, allowing everyone to take a peek and play around with Honeycomb using the Android emulator, was launched yesterday, but after we got past the initial excitement, we found that the emulator itself was dog slow and pretty much unusable. In fact, it was so frustrating to use it that I wanted to punch walls and rip out my hair after 5 minutes with it. And I'm not even going to talk about orientation problems - how the Android team managed to ship the SDK with orientation broken by default (there is a fix for it in the Settings > Display) is beyond me and beyond the scope of this article.

Jan

For Developers: SDK Tools r9 Now Lets You Edit Properties Of Existing Virtual Devices (AVDs). Finally!

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, News

Ah, what a breath of fresh air. After today's SDK Tools r9 and ADT 9.0.0 update that I talked about earlier this morning, I noticed another new feature in the SDK Manager that has been requested for years. As if the near-instant AVD restart support due to the new snapshotting was not enough of a present, developers can now edit properties of existing AVDs!

Before this update, once you've created an AVD, the AVD Manager did not let you touch any of its properties, forcing you to create a brand new virtual device for any tweaks. This was a giant pain for developers who needed to change or add a property, such as density, resolution, allocated memory, or API level.

Jan

For Developers: Google Releases ADT For Eclipse v9.0.0 And SDK Tools r9, Now Offers Near-Instant AVD Restarts [Hands-On]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Android OS, Development, News, Tips & Tutorials

If you are a developer, you will want to fire up SDK Manager right now and perform an update. Besides the Honeycomb SDK preview that we'll talk about separately, Google also unleashed the next version of Android Development Tools, or simply ADT, for Eclipse as well as SDK Tools r9. I've been using ADT versions 9.0.0 preview 1, 2, and 3 for a number of weeks now, and I can tell you that 9.0.0 is a huge step up to where a serious set of development tools needs to be.

What's New?

Numerous improvements to the Visual Layout Editor, "go to declaration" hyperlink support for quicker navigation around declarations, near-instant AVD restarts (holy crap!!!

Jan

Android 3.0 Honeycomb Gets Huge Feature Breakdown, Preview SDK Released

Posted by David Ruddock in Android OS, Development, Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News

The Android Developers Blog just announced the availability of a "preview" of the upcoming Android 3.0 SDK. Developers can start getting their Honeycomb on immediately, as the preview is available via the Android SDK and AVD manager as part of the Android SDK.

But even more exciting is the fact that the Android Developers page has been updated with a plethora of information regarding Honeycomb and its features. Where to begin?

What You Can See

The brief breakdown of Honeycomb's new elements according to Google:

New "holographic" UI
Bottom "system bar" for global status and notifications
Action bar for in-application controls
Redesigned home screen customization
Revamped "recent apps" menu
New keyboard
Improved text selection/copy/paste (multiselect, clipboard, and drag-and-drop)
Streamlined USB file transferring
Completely updated set of standard apps, including: Gmail, Calendar, Browser, Gallery, and Contacts

Under The Hood

Developers have reason to be hugely excited about Honeycomb, as it's bringing some major (awesome) changes to the Android OS.

Jan

Android Market Fails To Live Up To Google's Expectations, Improvements Needed

Posted by Abhiroop Basu in Android OS, Apps/Games, Development, News

In the past year the Android platform has exploded with a number of new smartphones and tablets launching as well as significant growth in the number of apps available in the Android Market. Despite its success, Google is "not happy" with lacklustre sales of paid apps in the Market, says Eric Chu, Android's platform manager. Speaking from the Inside Social Apps conference held in San Francisco earlier this week, Chu went on to give a very broad outline of Google's plan for the Android Market in 2011.

First and foremost for Android in the new year is the in-app payment system.

Jan

NVIDIA Tegra 3 Will Make PCs Obsolete In 2012

Posted by Abhiroop Basu in Development, News

CES 2011 was an occasion for manufacturers to flood the market with a plethora of Android devices, and powering many of them was NVidia's Tegra 2 chip.

Released late last year, the Tegra 2 chip uses the "system-on-a-chip" design to integrate an ARM CPU (1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 processor) and a NVidia GPU into one package. This allows faster communication between the cores and the integrated memory controller. Most of the tablets and smartphones, and other unique hybrids, launching in 2011 will be using the Tegra 2 chips.

But, no sooner has the dust settled and NVidia is already planning for the future. A leaked slide from NVidia reveals that the Tegra 2 will soon be replaced by the Tegra 2 3D, which will subsequently be usurped by the "world's first mobile quad-core processor," the Tegra 3.

Jan

HTC EVO 4G: Fix Music Streaming And (Maybe) Boost Your 3G Speeds With A Simple Hack

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Development, EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, News, Sprint

This morning, I noticed an interesting thread in the EVO subsection of the XDA forums that claimed to be able to fix music streaming (which was broken in some apps after the latest OTA), while boosting 3G speeds by .2 to .6 Mbps. As the process is very simple and easily reversible, I gave it a go - but decided that I was going to use SpeedTest to benchmark the changes. Unfortunately, what I found wasn't what I expected.

Before doing anything, I ran the test three times. Before the fix my average download speed was 938.67 Kbps. After I ran the fix, my speed dropped to an average of 782 Kbps.

Jan

Launcher Pro Updated With Homescreen Transition Effects [Video]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Development, News, Videos

Launcher Pro, my favorite launcher replacement, got updated today with a much requested feature - homescreen transition animations, available to all LP users, not just Plus. In addition to the usual and very smooth slide effect, we now have 4 more: Scale, Rotate, Flip, and Cube. All are smooth, except for the Cube transition, so I would advise against using it until Fede makes it a bit more snappy. Out of 5 transitions (including the regular slide), my favorite is definitely Flip. What's yours?

^{Excuse the poor frame rate in the screencast - unfortunately, that's ShootMe's max for the time being}

Source: Launcher Pro

Jan

Motorola Working On A Developer-Friendly "Bootloader Solution" After YouTube Comment Debacle

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, Development, Motorola, News

Oh, boy... what a mess this is. Earlier this week, a Motorola employee with access to the company's official YouTube account replied to a (now deleted) comment about their locked bootloaders with "if you want to do custom roms, then buy elsewhere, we’ll continue with our strategy that is working thanks." Issues about eFuse aside, that's a pretty poor thing to say from a customer service perspective. Apparently, Motorola recognized that fact after somebody posted on their Facebook page they'd be taking that advice:

Does this mean they're doing away with eFuse? Maybe... maybe not. But at least we know they're exploring the possibility, and that a more modder-friendly Moto isn't completely out of the question.