Busy in Berlin

We had a great day at droidcamp today in Berlin. We presented two sessions, attended others, wrote a little about it over on Network World, and even had time to enjoy a beer with many of the droidcamp gang at a local pub.

Read about some of the hot topics discussed in our article, Six Hot Android Topics at DroidCamp. We had slides for one of our presentations, too. They're available here:

Finally, over at Network World, you can win a free copy of our book! See here for details.

Android 2.0 & Droidcon!

It seems like we were justing about Android 1.6. Oh, wait, we were! Well, we have to admit: Android 2.0 is a little underwhelming from the developer point of view. It seems more like Android 1.7. Still, it's great progress and items like the account manager for using multiple accounts across the handset will be great for users and developers alike.

One item we liked, especially since we're on the road this month attending conferences and checking out the Android phones available in Europe, is the built-in update abilities that simply add support for Android 2.0 instead of require a completely new installation and configuration. All we had to do was run the SDK and AVK manager, update to the latest and run the Eclipse updates to get the newest plugin and we were good to go with 2.0!

On code we've tested, we haven't noticed any new issues with 2.0. However, if you run across any issues with our book code, please let us know! Once we've returned from our travels, we'll do a more thorough evaluation--with one of the new Android 2.0 handsets.

We're on the road? That's right! We're just days away from Droidcon in Berlin! See you there!

Android 1.6 SDK Now Available

Welcome to API Level 4!

The Android 1.6 SDK is now available for download. Many of the highlights are good for users and manufacturers, such as a Market update and support for CDMA hardware. What's good for users is good for developers. Also included is a new gestures framework and a tool for creating gestures, multi-lingual and accent text-to-speech, and better search capabilities.

The API changes list is relatively small; this is an incremental upgrade with some nice features, but not a sweeping change by any means.

The update is set to be on handsets as early as October, according to the release notes.

Android App Widget Article on User Interaction Published

Our next article about Android App Widgets has been published over at developer.com. This time, we talk about how to add user interaction to an App Widget using the limited RemoteViews ability to register Intents to trigger when a user touches an item. This article builds upon our previous article, which discussed building an App Widget with a custom -- and user configurable -- update rate.

Go build some great interactive widgets now!

Android Wireless Application Development Now available!

Our first book, Android Wireless Application Development, is now in stock and available for purchase.

Referring to Android Resources Using URIs

In addition to loading Android resources using the Resource manager, you can also reference resources using a specially-formatted URI. Resource URIs can be referenced by resource type/name or by resource identifier. This can be especially useful if you are using a control like a VideoView which takes either a file path or a URI for the video source.

For example, let's say we have a VideoView and we want to load a resource from the raw resources called myvideo.3gp. We could construct a URI in two ways:

Using the resource id, the format is:

"android.resource://[package]/[res id]"

Uri path = Uri.parse("android.resource://com.androidbook.samplevideo/" + R.raw.myvideo);

or, using the resource subdirectory (type) and resource name (filename without extension), the format is:

"android.resource://[package]/[res type]/[res name]"

Uri path = Uri.parse("android.resource://com.androidbook.samplevideo/raw/myvideo");

This Uri can then be used to source the VideoView as follows:

VideoView myVid = (VideoView) findViewById(R.id.VideoView1);
myVid.setVideoURI(path);

You can now refer to any resource by URI.

Sample Chapter From Our Book Available

Our first book, Android Wireless Application Development, is very close to hitting the shelves. Amazon currently lists August 28th availability. Of course, you can still get the Rough Cuts and check it out early!

A free sample chapter, Introducing Android, is now available on informIT. Check it out and give us feedback!