Android 2.2 gets more and more massive. Nexus One owners have been running official Froyo for a while already, EVOs are getting the update these very days and only lazy Droid owners (out of those who care) did not upgrade their devices to 2.2 manually yet. Obviously, the rest of 2.x devices are getting Froyo quite soon as well. As developers, we are more affected by new platform versions than con... [More]

Contrary to what some inexperienced developers think, NDK is not a silver bullet for any performance problem that you face in your app. Before you make a decision to rewrite a portion of your code in C, you have to think twice. Your effort might not pay off as much as you think, as NDK is not unconditionally faster than Dalvik code. If you already spent some time learning NDK, then you know that ... [More]

Everyone is familiar with Google Maps. The Maps are available on almost any platform, and whenever you want to look up something on a map, most of the time you will use the one from Google. The Maps are also available for Android, as a control that you can embed in your app and use for various geographic features. Although MapView itself is quite easy to understand and it has a nice API, creating... [More]

Animations are a great way to spice up the UI of your app. Although using too many animations can freak out the user, applying one or two in the right places can make the interface look professional and add some points to the user experience. Most developers have no problem learning and using the standard animations that Android provides, such as TranslateAnimation, RotateAnimation or AlphaAnimat... [More]

Mobile devices of the first generation were not capable of playing any sounds except monophonic ringtones. Today any smartphone platform supports playback, record and to some extent manipulation of digital sound, often up to CD quality. Android is no exception to that. Even older 1.5 devices can do a lot of things with digital audio. However, due to lack of guidance, a develope... [More]