News

Coming Soon: XDA-University.com

Launching soon, XDA-University.com will be a place to learn Android development, whether that’s learning how to root a phone, to embarking on more complex endeavors like building Android from source. XDA-U will be a crowd-sourced initiative that aims to be an always-growing, always-improving part of the Android community. There will even be a book, available as a free downloadable PDF, for those that want to really immerse themselves in the craft.

Tools

Android Maven Plugin 3.4.0 released

Manfred Moser from the Android Maven Plugin team announced the release of version 3.4.0 of the plugin.

New features are:

• Added support to specify application makefile in ndk-build
• New additional parameter for proguard goal, "outputDirectory"
• Support for building arm and x86 at the same time
• Fixed ndkstripper when no toolchain is specified
• Fixed parsing of error message from test failures
• Check renameManifestPackage parameter before using package from AndroidManifest.xml
• Make inclusion of JDK libs in ProGuard input optional
• Configure BuildConfig? generation via a mojo parameter instead of system property
• Added code to merge APKLIB manifests
• Improvements and fixes for APKLib support with Native code including sample projects
• Clean up of configuration for zipalign goal to work properly with pom, settings and command line config
• Fix for failure when ndk-build run twice by task sequence

Android Development Tools 21: Preview 10 available

Tor Norbye mentions that they're getting very close to done with ADT 21, so please take it for a spin as soon as possible and let them know if you see anything wrong. Besides all the new features, ADT 21 contains a large number of bug fixes relative to ADT 20 (such as the XML editing fix, but many more!), so even those of you who prefer to stay on stable releases should find this a better experience!

Android Scripts

Udi, lead Android developer for AnyDO, shares his set of scripts for automating many aspects of Android development.

mAdServe: Open Source Mobile Ad Server for Publishers

mAdserve is a fully featured mobile ad server for Publishers on any mobile platform. To give you a sense of what mAdserve can do, we have outlined the most important platform features below.

• Open Source SDKs for Android & iOS
• Multi User admin panel
• 31+ Ad networks supported
• Stay up to date on ad network traffic requirements
• Advanced targeting capabilities
• Support for banner ads and interstitials
• Realtime reporting

Open Source Projects of the Week

Otto

Otto is an event bus designed to decouple different parts of your application while still allowing them to communicate efficiently. Forked from Guava, Otto adds unique functionality to an already refined event bus as well as specializing it to the Android platform.

EventBus

EventBus is an Android optimized publish/subscribe event bus. A typical use case for Android apps is gluing Activities, Fragments, and background threads together. Conventional wiring of those elements often introduces complex and error-prone dependencies and life cycle issues. With EventBus propagating listeners through all participants (e.g. background service -> activity -> multiple fragments or helper classes) becomes deprecated. EventBus decouples event senders and receivers and thus simplifies communication between app components. Less code, better quality. And you don't need to implement a single interface!

Code

Presentation: The Fragment Transition

Corey Latislaw's presentation from StrangeLoop about Fragments.

Corey will show you techniques for starting a fresh project, renovating an existing Android code base, optimizing for tablets, and balancing use of new APIs, while remaining backward compatible. She has been using fragments as long as they have been around in the XfinityTV app as well as her personal projects. She’d never start a new project with out them!

Fauxboto - Amazon's Holo typeface bug on Kindle Fire

Jeff Gilfelt ran into a bug on the new ICS-based Amazon Kindle Fire HD. Here's his solution.

RoboSpice

RoboSpice is a modular android library that makes writing asynchronous network requests easy.

Main features of RoboSpice:

• executes asynchronously (in a background AndroidService) network requests
• supports REST out of the box (using Spring Android).
• is strongly typed ! You make your requests using POJOs and you get POJOs as request results.
• enforce no constraints neither on POJOs used for requests nor on Activity classes you use in your projects
• caches results in Json with both Jackson and Gson, or Xml, or flat text files, or binary files, even using ORM Lite (still in beta)
• notifies your activities (or any other context) of the result of the network request if and only if they are still alive
• no memory leaks at all, like Android Loaders, unlike Android AsyncTasks notifies your activities on their UI Thread
• uses a simple but robust exception handling model
• supports aggregation of different web services
• supports multi-threading of request executions
• is open source ;)
• and tested

Design

Marie Schweiz's Android Art Available for Sale

Marie Schweiz is a talented artist and designer, and lucky for us, has decided to start selling prints of some of her Android themed art. Check it out and order a couple!

Android Design in Action: Shopping Lists

Roman Nurik, Nick Butcher and Adam Koch showed some redesign ideas for the shopping list apps Grocery IQ and Out of Milk, which were previously reviewed in last week's App Clinic. They also focused on contextual actions, discussing the contextual action bar for single- and multi-item selections, swipe to complete, undo, and more.

Free Wallpapers from Androidicons

Androidicons.com was relaunched on June 22, with a completely new developer iconset for Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich & Jelly Bean, following Google's latest guidelines. We want to shout out a big THANK YOU for everybody supporting us and being passionate about Android and clean UI design in the last 4 months. Here's a small gift: Three wallpapers, created with the iconset, maybe for your new Nexus 7 or any other device. Enjoy.

How to Wireframe Your Mobile App in 5 Simple Steps

Brandon Nolte shows us how easy it is to wireframe your next app's design.

Styling the ActionBar - Part 6

Mark Alison continues his series on styling the ActionBar, this time discussing how to properly style the action mode.

Books

Android Application Development for Dummies: 2nd Edition

The 2nd Edition is chock full of Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean goodness. Getting Fragments and Loaders right is more nuanced than it seems, so if you still have questions you should definitely check out the latest edition.

The Android OS continues to rapidly expand offering app developers access to one of the largest platforms available, and this easy-to-follow guide walks you through the development process step by step. In this new edition of the bestselling Android Application Development For Dummies, Android programming experts Michael Burton and Donn Felker explain how to download the SDK, get Eclipse up and running, code Android applications, and share your finished products with the world.

Featuring two sample programs, this book explores everything from the simple basics to advanced aspects of Android application development.

• Walks you through all the steps in developing applications for the Android platform, including the latest Android features like scrollable widgets, enhanced UI tools, social media integration, and new calendar and contact capabilities
• Starts off with downloading the SDK, then explains how to bring your applications to life and submit your work to the Android Market
• Includes real-world advice from expert programmers Donn Felker and Michael Burton, who break every aspect of the development process down into practical, digestible pieces

Whether you're new to Android development or already on your way, Android Application Development For Dummies, 2nd Edition is the guide you need to dig into the app dev process!

Miscellaneous

Video: Home Automation with Android

Dror Matalon, co-founder of SmartyHome, talks to the SF Android Usergroup about the past, present, and future of home automation, and how his startup SmartyHome plans on breaking into the market. For those interested in automating their home today, Dror goes over the most popular products on the market, as well as some of the common problems that face DIY home automators.

DIY: Turn an old lamp into a flexible phone stand

Well, there were just two things: call me a cheapskate, but I won't pay $30 for an accessory I think I can make myself; and most importantly, putting so much pressure on your phone's charging port may eventually damage it. After hours of prototyping and testing, I fabricated an alternative that promises the flexibility of Une Bobine without the $30 price tag (and without the potential harm.) I'm calling it: La Bobina.