Faster Screen Orientation Change with Android
Android is a mobile operating system meant to be run on a wide array of devices, with very different hardware configurations. Some devices, like the T-Mobile G1, can change their hardware configuration at runtime. For instance, when you open the keyboard, the screen change from the portrait orientation to the landscape orientation. To make Android [...]
Track memory allocations on Android
Despite the impressive hardware of the first Android phones (T-Mobile G1 and ADP1) writing efficient mobile applications is not always straightforward. Android applications rely on automatic memory management handled by Dalvik’s garbage collector which can sometimes cause performance issues if you are not careful with memory allocations. In a performance sensitive code path, like the [...]
Shelves, an Open Source Android application
A few months ago, I showed Shelves, an application to manage a collection of books on Android powered phones. I am an avid user of Delicious Library on MacOS X and I since no similar application existed at the time for Android, I decided to write my own. Needless to say, Shelves was largely inspired [...]
Why is my list black? An Android optimization
ListView is one of Android’s most widely used widgets. It is rather easy to user, very flexible and incredibly powerful. ListView can also be difficult to understand at times. One of the most common issues with ListView happens when you try to use a custom background. By default, like many Android widgets, ListView has a [...]
Avoid memory leaks on Android
Android applications are, at least on the T-Mobile G1, limited to 16 MB of heap. It’s both a lot of memory for a phone and yet very little for what some developers want to achieve. Even if you do not plan on using all of this memory, you should use as little as possible to [...]
Android: Can I use this Intent?
Android offers a very powerful and yet easy to use tool called intents. An intent can be use to turn applications into high-level libraries and make code re-use something even better than before. The Android Home screen and AnyCut use intents extensively to create shortcuts for instance. While it is nice to be able to [...]
Devoxx 08 Wrapup
Devoxx is unfortunately over but it was, as usual, awesome! Congratulations once again to the Devoxx team for their hard work and a fantastic result. I am really glad where the conference is going as this year it wasn’t only about Java. We thus got sessions on Flex, Silverlight, Groovy, Android… I can’t wait to [...]
Official Android Development Phones
As of today, developers can buy an Android development phone. What is so great about it? It is not SIM-locked and you can flash the firmware with the Open Source Android code base. These developments phones are basically what the Android team uses every day. They’re even better because they are based on the final [...]
IntelliJ IDEA 8
I’ve been using IntelliJ IDEA 8 since its recent release and I love it. There are not many new features I will use but the UI and performance improvements are most welcome. Congratulations to the JetBrains team for another excellent release!
Android talk at Devoxx
I am very happy to say that I will be at Devoxx this year to give a couple of presentations about Android. The presentations are, very surprisingly, entitled Filthy Rich Android Clients. If you want to learn cool stuff about Android and/or if you want to see cool demos running on a real Android phone, [...]
Another cool Android application
A new cool application was released by Google this week as part of the Apps for Android project. This application is called Photostream and lets you browse the photos collection of any Flickr user. The official Android blog has more details about the application. The source code is available on the Subversion repository and is [...]
Simple Android application
ShutterSpeed is a simple Android application I wrote this weekend. The application itself is not terribly useful nor interesting, but it shows how to create an Android application that uses a few advanced features like orientation-based layouts, styles, themes, etc. ShutterSpeed lets you compute the correct exposure for the ISO and aperture of your choice, [...]
New Android SDK
After months of hard work, I am pleased to see our latest Android SDK publicly available. There are tons of new stuff for you to play with!
Still Alive
Android is still eating away all of my spare time but I really hope to be able to blog again very soon.
Update
I would like to apologize to the loyal readers of this blog for the lack of updates since last december. Android is a fascinating project which keeps me very busy at work and I would probably need to clone myself a few times to implement all the features I would like to see in it. [...]
Getting Started with Android
Android’s SDK is here. Don’t miss the videos to get tutorials and see cool demos.
Android and Google
Now you know what I’ve been up to at Google.
