Android apps: Magic Hour and X-Men
I was delighted to find these two applications on Android Market today. The first, Magic Hour is a great camera/photo editing application. I could write at length about its user interface and editing features, but it’s the built-in filters market that makes Magic Hour so interesting and fun to use. Magic Hour is now my [...]
Android presentations at Google I/O 2011
I had the chance to spend two full days at Google I/O 2011 earlier this week and I enjoyed spending so much time talking with many Android developers. You guys are doing an amazing job and I can’t wait to download and use some of the apps you showed me! Google I/O was also the [...]
Source code for Android 3.0 animation demo
I published last week a video of a simple Android 3.0 animation demo and I promised I would publish the source code as soon as possible. I am happy to tell you that it is now available on Google Code.
Android 3.0 animations demo
Watch in full 720p. This is a very simple demo that shows how to use some of the new Android 3.0 APIs.
Bitmap quality, banding and dithering
Android 2.3 is finally out! I recently mentioned changes to default bitmaps and windows formats we made in Gingerbread and I would like to explain why these changes were made. I will also show you the difference between Android’s various bitmap formats and why you must use them carefully.
Gingerbread and 32 bits windows
I recently published the slides of two Android talks Chet Haase and I gave at Devoxx in November. One slide in particular got a lot of interest from various Android web sites:
Android Graphics, Animations and Tips & Tricks
Chet Haase and I recently gave several presentations at Devoxx and the San Francisco Android user group. We’ve just posted the slides for two of these presentations: Android Graphics and Animations Android UI Development: Tips and Tricks These two presentations will teach you about development techniques we use every day on the Android team. The [...]
Android app: Retro Camera
As I mentioned a few days ago, I would like to present you Android applications I find interesting, useful, impressive or generally noteworthy. It’s not secret that I like photography, it should therefore not be surprising to some of you that I will start with a camera application. Retro Camera by Urbian follows a recent [...]
Noteworthy Android applications
I recently asked my Twitter followers what their favorite Android application was. I got a lot of replies and I was happily surprised by the wide variety of apps mentioned. I often mention apps and games I like on Twitter but this little experiment convinced me it would be nice to do the same on [...]
ScrollView’s handy trick
ScrollView is one of Android’s most commonly used widget and is also one of the easiest to use. When something is too big to fit on screen, drop it inside a ScrollView and you’re done. You can’t even get it wrong since a ScrollView accepts only one child at a time. There is, however, one [...]
Android to Photoshop
Android 2.2 was unveiled a few days ago at Google I/O and the SDK is now available for download. Android 2.2 offers numerous improvements and new features and there is one I would like to talk about in detail, the new Capture PSD tool. Capture PSD can be found in HierarchyViewer and requires an emulator [...]
Nexus One live wallpapers
You are probably aware that our new Nexus One Android phone comes loaded with live wallpapers. I had the chance to work on some of them and I wanted to share with you high-resolution images of Grass and Galaxy. These two wallpapers were prototyped as desktop applications and you can see below what they look [...]
Nexus One wallpapers
Now that Nexus One is available, I can share with you the high resolution versions of several of the wallpapers that ship on the phone. The photos are available in resolutions up to 22 Mpixels. Enjoy!
Android at Devoxx 09
I will be at Devoxx from November the 16th to the 20th to talk about Android. My session will explain how to write resolution independent applications. I will also introduce you to a new exciting graphics technology we’ve been working on.
Google I/O videos available
Google I/O and JavaOne are finally over and it’s a good thing, because after 5 sessions and 1 keynote, I was getting a bit tired :) The good news for you is that all of the Android sessions we gave at Google I/O are available online. You can watch the entire video recording of each [...]
Drawable mutations
Android’s drawables are extremely useful to easily build applications. A Drawable is pluggable drawing container that is usually associated with a View. For instance, a BitmapDrawable is used to display images, a ShapeDrawable to draw shapes and gradients, etc. You can even combine them to create complex renderings. Drawables allows to easily customize the rendering [...]
Upcoming conference talks
The next few weeks will be quite busy for me. I’ll be at Google I/O the last week of May in San Francisco to give a talk on Android entitled Turbo-charge your UI. If you want to learn cool techniques on how to improve the performance of your Android applications, that’s where you want to [...]
Android 1.5 is available
Android 1.5 is finally available! You can get the brand new SDK as well as a new system image for the Android Developer Phone 1.
Android Layout Tricks #4: Optimize, Part 2
Sharing and reusing layouts is very easy with Android thanks to the <include /> tag, sometimes even too easy and you might end up with user interfaces that contain a large number of views, some of which are rarely used. Thankfully, Android offers a very special widget called ViewStub, which brings you all the benefits [...]
Speed up your Android UI
Some Android applications require to squeeze every bit of performance out of the UI toolkit and there are many ways to do so. In this article, you will discover how to speed up the drawing and the perceived startup time of your activities. Both these techniques rely on a single feature, the window’s background drawable. [...]
Android Layout Tricks #3: Optimize, Part 1
In the previous installment of Android Layout Tricks, I showed you how to use the <include /> tag in XML layout to reuse and share your layout code. I also mentioned the <merge /> and it’s now time to learn how to use it. The <merge /> was created for the purpose of optimizing Android [...]
Android Layout Trick #2: Include to Reuse
Android comes with a wide variety of widgets, small visual construction blocks you can glue together to present the users with complex and useful interfaces. However applications often need higher level visual components. A component can be seen as a complex widget made of several simple stock widgets. You could for instance reuse a panel [...]
Android Layout Tricks #1
The Android UI toolkit offers several layout managers that are rather easy to use and, most of the time, you only need the basic features of these layout managers to implement a user interface. Sticking to the basic features is unfortunately not the most efficient way to create user interfaces. A common example is the [...]
