A Quick security update of the Android SDK have just been released fixing mainly a security issue involving handling of image files. Android SDK version m5-rc15 is available for download. There is no API change or new features introduced in this release, but it is recommended to upgrade.

The update doesn’t change any of the Android APIs or introduce any new ones. Eclipse users don’t need to update the ADT plug-in either. Once you’ve unzipped the file on your machine, you will want to update things like your PATH variable and, if you’re using Eclipse, the SDK location setting for ADT (hint: Preferences > Android).

Notice that if you did not yet upgrade from m3 to m5, you might take a look at the upgrade instructions and then the API changes overview. For even more details on the changes, there is an API differences report.

No big changes should be expected after the m5 release and the major API change in the SDK, in the next months at least. There will be more bug fixes and API improvments until we get hands on the first Android Handset.

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The most awaited update of Android SDK is finally available! Most notable change in this release is the new user interface; I really feel this time that I’m on a Linux-based mobile phone. The interface looks really much better and definitely ready for the prime time, even with work in progress. The bad news is that for the first time we started talking about “porting an application” and “API change”. At this time everything is under development, but it’s worrying for the future of Android platform if we see many version of the SDK where applications are not compatible and have to be changed and recompiled, and go back to old times !

Highlighted features in this release :

• New user interface - totally remodeled interface, new design and icons, looks much better.
• Layout animations - Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package
• Geo-coding - android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e. translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa), and also search for businesses.
• New media codecs - The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.
• Search Manager - A new search API is now available android.app.SearchManager, providing the ability to to search for user, system or network based data, making search a seamless, system-wide feature.
• Updated Eclipse plug-in - A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

Something very interesting in the new interface is the new menus. Now it is more iphone-like - if I can say - Menus have been iconized which make it easier for touchscreen phones, and we can see the blurred menus by the end, so you can scroll down/up to see more menu options. To dig into the new Android interface here is some screenshots from the new SDK :

Home of the Android Platform

Android dialer

Android Dev Tools

Browser Menu replaced by icons

By clicking on more you get the entire menu

Android New Contact

Android Call Manager

Ready to go ? download the new Android SDK, read M5 announcement on the Developers blog.

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I just finished downloading and installing everything necessary to get Android working and started experimenting the new platform, sample applications, which I find amazing. As you can see below it’s the hello world application running on Android platform :

I just didn’t like the emulator so much, but I guess there will be more amazing devices in the future. So as development platform it’s very fine, I just have to be more familiar with the navigation pad.

So back to Android platform, the home screen show the browser in the middle screen, which based on Webkit, then three major applications included with the system Contacts manager, Recent calls and Maps in addition to sample demos. Below the full list as shown in Android. I still don’t know much on installing applications, and how to make more personalisations, but with such great documentation I guess this would be for the next days.

There is a special page on Youtube showing Android talks, and I stopped at the first video where Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz showing some of the main features. Steve showed something that I didn’t know how to try on the emulator, which is the text notifications. It’s a small chat application where you can receive notifications from your friends. I noticed xmpp settings in the system so I guess it is for gmail chat, or other jabber servers.

Well, that’s all for today. We’ll make certainly more experiments in the next days to get to know Android better.

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Finally, Android SDK have just been released for developers via Google code. The SDK download is available for three platforms Windows (59MB), MacOS (55MB) and Linux (55MB), the version code for this release is M3-RC20a and there are already 16 known issues that you might encounter during Android SDK usage, and which should be fixed in future releases.

As we were expecting in the previous post, the development platform is around Eclipse. An eclipse plugin is available to help developing and debugging Android’s applications. Android documenation is very well done and include all the necessary from requirements, to getting started, developping applications, references informations, until sample code. In addition to the API demo showing the SDK capabilities, two demo applications are available with sources : Lunar Lander game and a simple notepad application.

Android Challenge: $10 million to give away

With the announcement of Android SDK, the alliance offered $10 million for developers in a challenge to finance developments and certainly encourage getting more amazing applications in a very short time. There will be in total 50 winners and getting each one from $25k, to $100k or $275k. This is not just for fun I’m sure, the challenge will be in two parts. In the first part, submissions will be accepted from January 2 through March 3, 2008, and the second part will be after the first handsets built on the platform become available sometimes in the second half of 2008.

You can build any kind of applications from from Social networking, Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos, Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc., Gaming, News and information, Rethinking of traditional user interfaces, Use of mash-up functionality, Use of location-based services, Humanitarian benefits, Applications in service of global economic development, to Whatever you’re excited about!

This will certainly bring amazing applications to Android and slow down development for other platforms by loosing some open source mobile developers.

Conclusion

Overall, I think that Android succeeded its launch, the time to get more familiar with the SDK and the platform, you might check the new Android developers blog, and official dev group to ask questions and meet the Android team. Also the time to finish my download and get the SDK working on my laptop. Amazing but true, the open mobile platform is already here !

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