Android tablet devices or "pads", are soon to come to the market in massive amounts. Some of them are already available, but most experts will tell you that the best devices, including one from Google, are yet to appear. Regardless of that, as a developer, you have to be a step ahead and test your applications for tablet compatibility right now. How to do that if you don't own a device? I'll try ... [More]

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]

In addition to situations where you want to improve performance of critical parts of your code by rewriting them in C, as it was shown in the previous article, there is another common use case for Android NDK. Often you will find useful pieces of legacy code written in C and you'll want to use them in your apps. In this case, your obvious choice would be to try to use NDK to attach the legacy code... [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]

If you are a Java developer interested in learning more about Android, or if you're determined you want to master that new and thriving mobile platform, chances are you have more experience working on the server side than on embedded platforms. After all, most of the success that Java has had has been concentrated around Web and Enterprise applications rather than mobile apps. (Yes, Java ME has ... [More]

If you started your mobile development on a platform like Java ME, you will probably appreciate the heap sizes that Android gives to its apps. In fact, the minimum heap size that the Android compatibility guide requires is 16 Mb, and the more typical size is 24 Mb. This seems to be large enough for a typical app, so you should rarely run into out of memory issues with simple apps. That, however, ... [More]

The MVC (model-view-controller) pattern has been extremely popular in web application frameworks, but even if you never developed for the Web, I am sure that you at least heard this term before. Today we will develop a simple star rating widget that looks like this: This widget works the following way: every time you tap it, the number of stars increases by 1. If there were 5 stars, the rating... [More]

One of the major reasons why Java became so popular is the vast amount of existing code such as libraries, examples and open source applications, that is available to Java developers. When you develop in Java, chances are most of the "chore" code that your application needs has already been written, and good chances are that the code that you need is open source and has a flexible license. Thus, a... [More]