Posts Tagged Android 4.0 Development
Android 4.0 Development – The New Goodies
Posted by Embedded Board in Embedded Development on December 10, 2011
Android 4.0 (code name “Ice Cream Sandwich”) was officially launched on 19 October 2011 in Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich release event. Let’s go over the main features and improvement that this new version provides us as developers.
In developer’s point of view, the Android 4.0 brings many new features and capabilities and a lot of new APIs. Any Android 4.0 developer will agree on the point that this version has increased performance of applications dramatically. We start with the new connectivity feature Wi-Fi Direct. This allows developers to create applications for sharing data like photos or any other file without the need of wireless access point. This feature in particular enables game developers to add network gaming capability – again without the need of wireless access point.
The Android 4.0 brings a series of new social APIs. The most prominent include Android Beam, which is an exciting new feature which allows two NFC (Near Field Communication) enabled phones to start communication by just touching with each other. This allows developers to make applications to share small data in a new way. For large amount of data this type of connection can initiate Bluetooth connection. Second, is shared calendar content provider and framework API, which provides developers the possibility to use calendar services for their applications (and with the personalization of the various gadgets, this is quite useful).
In addition, the new release provides many new media capabilities, including direct and efficient path for low level streaming multimedia, new camera features like full resolution image capture while capturing video, and new ways of setting white balance and exposure. The support for many new media types and containers like VP8, HTTP Live streaming protocol version 3 and many more give application developer s a lot of flexibility and easiness in developing media related application .
When it comes to UI, Android 4.0 brings a new unified UI for phones, tablets and any Android powered device which was a demanding feature by developers, since it helps to maintain consisting design practices and easiness in code development process. Furthermore, this new UI gives a new layout called grid layout, which has proved to increase performance of applications. Similarly, a new texture view object lets developers directly integrate OpenGL ES textures as rendering targets in a UI hierarchy.
Android 4.0 offers an enhanced accessibility API specially designed for devices which have not hardware buttons. Using a text to speech API the developers can easily write text to speech engines. Earlier Android did not have text to speech API at framework level. This was also a demand by developers to develop text to speech conversion applications easily.
In conclusion, no doubt that Android 4.0 is a major improvement in comparison to the previous versions. This reflects the growth in the needs of the users, especially regarding connectivity and sharing and media handling. It will be interesting to see how the new generation of products and gadgets will look like with the Android ICS. Until then – it’s time to think and imagine how will Android 5.0 will look like!
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