[This post is by Chris Pruett, who writes regularly about games here, and is obviously pretty cranked about this conference. — Tim Bray]
Android will descend in force upon the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week; we’re offering a full day packed with sessions covering everything you need to know to build games on Android.
From 10 AM to 5 PM on Tuesday the 1st, North Hall Room 121 will be ground zero for Android Developer Day, with five engineering-focused sessions on everything from compatibility to native audio and graphics. Here's a quick overview; there’s more on the Game Developer Conference site:
Building Aggressively Compatible Android Games — Chris Pruett
C++ On Android Just Got Better: The New NDK — Daniel Galpin and Ian Ni-Lewis
OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android: Building Google Body — Nico Weber
Android Native Audio — Glenn Kasten and Jean-Michel Trivi
Evading Pirates and Stopping Vampires Using License Server, In App Billing, and AppEngine — Daniel Galpin and Trevor Johns
Our crack team of engineers and advocates spend their nights devising new ways to bring high-end game content to Android, and a full day of sessions just wasn't enough to appease them. So in addition, you can find incisive Android insight in other tracks:
Finally, you can visit us in the Google booth on the GDC Expo floor; stop by, fondle the latest devices, and check out the awesome games that are already running on them. We're foaming at the mouth with excitement about the Game Developers Conference next week, and you should be too.
Hope to see you there!
You have read this article with the title February 2011. You can bookmark this page URL http://azaquery.blogspot.com/2011/02/heading-for-gdc_27.html. Thanks!
[This post is by Chet Haase, an Android engineer who specializes in graphics and animation, and who occasionally posts videos and articles on these topics on his CodeDependent blog at graphics-geek.blogspot.com. — Tim Bray]
One of the new features ushered in with the Honeycomb release is a new animation system, a set of APIs in a whole new package (android.animation) that makes animating objects and properties much easier than it was before.
"But wait!" you blurt out, nearly projecting a mouthful of coffee onto your keyboard while reading this article, "Isn't there already an animation system in Android?"
Animation Prior to Honeycomb
Indeed, Android already has animation capabilities: there are several classes and lots of great functionality in the android.view.animation package. For example, you can move, scale, rotate, and fade Views and combine multiple animations together in an AnimationSet object to coordinate them. You can specify animations in a LayoutAnimationController to get automatically staggered animation start times as a container lays out its child views. And you can use one of the many Interpolator implementations like AccelerateInterpolator and Bounce to get natural, nonlinear timing behavior.
But there are a couple of major pieces of functionality lacking in the previous system.
For one thing, you can animate Views... and that's it. To a great extent, that's okay. The GUI objects in Android are, after all, Views. So as long as you want to move a Button, or a TextView, or a LinearLayout, or any other GUI object, the animations have you covered. But what if you have some custom drawing in your view that you'd like to animate, like the position of a Drawable, or the translucency of its background color? Then you're on your own, because the previous animation system only understands how to manipulate View objects.
The previous animations also have a limited scope: you can move, rotate, scale, and fade a View... and that's it. What about animating the background color of a View? Again, you're on your own, because the previous animations had a hard-coded set of things they were able to do, and you could not make them do anything else.
Finally, the previous animations changed the visual appearance of the target objects... but they didn't actually change the objects themselves. You may have run into this problem. Let's say you want to move a Button from one side of the screen to the other. You can use a TranslateAnimation to do so, and the button will happily glide along to the other side of the screen. And when the animation is done, it will gladly snap back into its original location. So you find the setFillAfter(true) method on Animation and try it again. This time the button stays in place at the location to which it was animated. And you can verify that by clicking on it - Hey! How come the button isn't clicking? The problem is that the animation changes where the button is drawn, but not where the button physically exists within the container. If you want to click on the button, you'll have to click the location that it used to live in. Or, as a more effective solution (and one just a tad more useful to your users), you'll have to write your code to actually change the location of the button in the layout when the animation finishes.
It is for these reasons, among others, that we decided to offer a new animation system in Honeycomb, one built on the idea of "property animation."
Property Animation in Honeycomb
The new animation system in Honeycomb is not specific to Views, is not limited to specific properties on objects, and is not just a visual animation system. Instead, it is a system that is all about animating values over time, and assigning those values to target objects and properties - any target objects and properties. So you can move a View or fade it in. And you can move a Drawable inside a View. And you can animate the background color of a Drawable. In fact, you can animate the values of any data structure; you just tell the animation system how long to run for, how to evaluate between values of a custom type, and what values to animate between, and the system handles the details of calculating the animated values and setting them on the target object.
Since the system is actually changing properties on target objects, the objects themselves are changed, not simply their appearance. So that button you move is actually moved, not just drawn in a different place. You can even click it in its animated location. Go ahead and click it; I dare you.
I'll walk briefly through some of the main classes at work in the new system, showing some sample code when appropriate. But for a more detailed view of how things work, check out the API Demos in the SDK for the new animations. There are many small applications written for the new Animations category (at the top of the list of demos in the application, right before the word App. I like working on animation because it usually comes first in the alphabet).
In fact, here's a quick video showing some of the animation code at work. The video starts off on the home screen of the device, where you can see some of the animation system at work in the transitions between screens. Then the video shows a sampling of some of the API Demos applications, to show the various kinds of things that the new animation system can do. This video was taken straight from the screen of a Honeycomb device, so this is what you should see on your system, once you install API Demos from the SDK.
Animator
Animator is the superclass of the new animation classes, and has some of the common attributes and functionality of the subclasses. The subclasses are ValueAnimator, which is the core timing engine of the system and which we'll see in the next section, and AnimatorSet, which is used to choreograph multiple animators together into a single animation. You do not use Animator directly, but some of the methods and properties of the subclasses are exposed at this superclass level, like the duration, startDelay and listener functionality.
The listeners tend to be important, because sometimes you want to key some action off of the end of an animation, such as removing a view after an animation fading it out is done. To listen for animator lifecycle events, implement the AnimatorListener interface and add your listener to the Animator in question. For example, to perform an action when the animator ends, you could do this:
anim.addListener(new Animator.AnimatorListener() { public void onAnimationStart(Animator animation) {} public void onAnimationEnd(Animator animation) { // do something when the animation is done } public void onAnimationCancel(Animator animation) {} public void onAnimationRepeat(Animator animation) {} });
As a convenience, there is an adapter class, AnimatorListenerAdapter, that stubs out these methods so that you only need to override the one(s) that you care about:
anim.addListener(new AnimatorListenerAdapter() { public void onAnimationEnd(Animator animation) { // do something when the animation is done } });
ValueAnimator
ValueAnimator is the main workhorse of the entire system. It runs the internal timing loop that causes all of a process's animations to calculate and set values and has all of the core functionality that allows it to do this, including the timing details of each animation, information about whether an animation repeats, listeners that receive update events, and the capability of evaluating different types of values (see TypeEvaluator for more on this). There are two pieces to animating properties: calculating the animated values and setting those values on the object and property in question. ValueAnimator takes care of the first part; calculating the values. The ObjectAnimator class, which we'll see next, is responsible for setting those values on target objects.
Most of the time, you will want to use ObjectAnimator, because it makes the whole process of animating values on target objects much easier. But sometimes you may want to use ValueAnimator directly. For example, the object you want to animate may not expose setter functions necessary for the property animation system to work. Or perhaps you want to run a single animation and set several properties from that one animated value. Or maybe you just want a simple timing mechanism. Whatever the case, using ValueAnimator is easy; you just set it up with the animation properties and values that you want and start it. For example, to animate values between 0 and 1 over a half-second, you could do this:
But animations are a bit like the tree in the forest philosophy question ("If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"). If you don't actually do anything with the values, does the animation run? Unlike the tree question, this one has an answer: of course it runs. But if you're not doing anything with the values, it might as well not be running. If you started it, chances are you want to do something with the values that it calculates along the way. So you add a listener to it, to listen for updates at each frame. And when you get the callback, you call getAnimatedValue(), which returns an Object, to find out what the current value is.
anim.addUpdateListener(new ValueAnimator.AnimatorUpdateListener() { public void onAnimationUpdate(ValueAnimator animation) { Float value = (Float) animation.getAnimatedValue(); // do something with value... } });
Of course, you don't necessarily always want to animate float values. Maybe you need to animate something that's an integer instead:
In fact, maybe you need to animate something entirely different, like a Point, or a Rect, or some custom data structure of your own. The only types that the animation system understands by default are float and int, but that doesn't mean that you're stuck with those two types. You can to use the Object version of the factory method, along with a TypeEvaluator (explained later), to tell the system how to calculate animated values for this unknown type:
Point p0 = new Point(0, 0); Point p1 = new Point(100, 200); ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofObject(pointEvaluator, p0, p1);
There are other animation attributes that you can set on a ValueAnimator besides duration, including:
setStartDelay(long): This property controls how long the animation waits after a call to start() before it starts playing.
setRepeatCount(int) and setRepeatMode(int): These functions control how many times the animation repeats and whether it repeats in a loop or reverses direction each time.
setInterpolator(TimeInterpolator): This object controls the timing behavior of the animation. By default, animations accelerate into and decelerate out of the motion, but you can change that behavior by setting a different interpolator. This function acts just like the one of the same name in the previous Animation class; it's just that the type of the parameter (TimeInterpolator) is different from that of the previous version (Interpolator). But the TimeInterpolator interface is just a super-interface of the existing Interpolator interface in the android.view.animation package, so you can use any of the existing Interpolator implementations, like Bounce, as arguments to this function on ValueAnimator.
ObjectAnimator
ObjectAnimator is probably the main class that you will use in the new animation system. You use it to construct animations with the timing and values that ValueAnimator takes, and also give it a target object and property name to animate. It then quietly animates the value and sets those animated values on the specified object/property. For example, to fade out some object myObject, we could animate the alpha property like this:
Note, in this example, a special feature that you can use to make your animations more succinct; you can tell it the value to animate to, and it will use the current value of the property as the starting value. In this case, the animation will start from whatever value alpha has now and will end up at 0.
You could create the same thing in an XML resource as follows:
There is a hidden assumption here about properties and getter/setter functions that you have to understand before using ObjectAnimator: you must have a public "set" function on your object that corresponds to the property name and takes the appropriate type. Also, if you use only one value, as in the example above, your are asking the animation system to derive the starting value from the object, so you must also have a public "get" function which returns the appropriate type. For example, the class of myObject in the code above must have these two public functions in order for the animation to succeed:
public void setAlpha(float value); public float getAlpha();
So by passing in a target object of some type and the name of some property foo supposedly on that object, you are implicitly declaring a contract that that object has at least a setFoo() function and possibly also a getFoo() function, both of which handle the type used in the animation declaration. If all of this is true, then the animation will be able to find those setter/getter functions on the object and set values during the animation. If the functions do not exist, then the animation will fail at runtime, since it will be unable to locate the functions it needs. (Note to users of ProGuard, or other code-stripping utilities: If your setter/getter functions are not used anywhere else in the code, make sure you tell the utility to leave the functions there, because otherwise they may get stripped out. The binding during animation creation is very loose and these utilities have no way of knowing that these functions will be required at runtime.)
View properties
The observant reader, or at least the ones that have not yet browsed on to some other article, may have pinpointed a flaw in the system thus far. If the new animation framework revolves around animating properties, and if animations will be used to animate, to a large extent, View objects, then how can they be used against the View class, which exposes none of its properties through set/get functions?
Excellent question: you get to advance to the bonus round and keep reading.
The way it works is that we added new properties to the View class in Honeycomb. The old animation system transformed and faded View objects by just changing the way that they were drawn. This was actually functionality handled in the container of each View, because the View itself had no transform properties to manipulate. But now it does: we've added several properties to View to make it possible to animate Views directly, allowing you to not only transform the way a View looks, but to transform its actual location and orientation. Here are the new properties in View that you can set, get and animate directly:
translationX and translationY: These properties control where the View is located as a delta from its left and top coordinates which are set by its layout container. You can run a move animation on a button by animating these, like this: ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(view, "translationX", 0f, 100f);.
rotation, rotationX, and rotationY: These properties control the rotation in 2D (rotation) and 3D around the pivot point.
scaleX and scaleY: These properties control the 2D scaling of a View around its pivot point.
pivotX and pivotY: These properties control the location of the pivot point, around which the rotation and scaling transforms occur. By default, the pivot point is centered at the center of the object.
x and y: These are simple utility properties to describe the final location of the View in its container, as a sum of the left/top and translationX/translationY values.
alpha: This is my personal favorite property. No longer is it necessary to fade out an object by changing a value on its transform (a process which just didn't seem right). Instead, there is an actual alpha value on the View itself. This value is 1 (opaque) by default, with a value of 0 representing full transparency (i.e., it won't be visible). To fade a View out, you can do this: ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(view, "alpha", 0f);
Note that all of the "properties" described above are actually available in the form of set/get functions (e.g., setRotation() and getRotation() for the rotation property). This makes them both possible to access from the animation system and (probably more importantly) likely to do the right thing when changed. That is, you don't want to scale an object and have it just sit there because the system didn't know that it needed to redraw the object in its new orientation; each of the setter functions takes care to run the appropriate invalidation step to make the rendering work correctly.
AnimatorSet
This class, like the previous AnimationSet, exists to make it easier to choreograph multiple animations. Suppose you want several animations running in tandem, like you want to fade out several views, then slide in other ones while fading them in. You could do all of this with separate animations and either manually starting the animations at the right times or with startDelays set on the various delayed animations. Or you could use AnimatorSet to do all of that for you. AnimatorSet allows you to animations that play together, playTogether(Animator...), animations that play one after the other, playSequentially(Animator...), or you can organically build up a set of animations that play together, sequentially, or with specified delays by calling the functions in the AnimatorSet.Builder class, with(), before(), and after(). For example, to fade out v1 and then slide in v2 while fading it, you could do something like this:
Like ValueAnimator and ObjectAnimator, you can create AnimatorSet objects in XML resources as well.
TypeEvaluator
I wanted to talk about just one more thing, and then I'll leave you alone to explore the code and play with the API demos. The last class I wanted to mention is TypeEvaluator. You may not use this class directly for most of your animations, but you should that it's there in case you need it. As I said earlier, the system knows how to animate float and int values, but otherwise it needs some help knowing how to interpolate between the values you give it. For example, if you want to animate between the Point values in one of the examples above, how is the system supposed to know how to interpolate the values between the start and end points? Here's the answer: you tell it how to interpolate, using TypeEvaluator.
TypeEvaluator is a simple interface that you implement that the system calls on each frame to help it calculate an animated value. It takes a floating point value which represents the current elapsed fraction of the animation and the start and end values that you supplied when you created the animation and it returns the interpolated value between those two values at that fraction. For example, here's the built-in FloatEvaluator class used to calculate animated floating point values:
But how does it work with a more complex type? For an example of that, here is an implementation of an evaluator for the Point class, from our earlier example:
public class PointEvaluator implements TypeEvaluator { public Object evaluate(float fraction, Object startValue, Object endValue) { Point startPoint = (Point) startValue; Point endPoint = (Point) endValue; return new Point(startPoint.x + fraction * (endPoint.x - startPoint.x), startPoint.y + fraction * (endPoint.y - startPoint.y)); } }
Basically, this evaluator (and probably any evaluator you would write) is just doing a simple linear interpolation between two values. In this case, each 'value' consists of two sub-values, so it is linearly interpolating between each of those.
You tell the animation system to use your evaluator by either calling the setEvaluator() method on ValueAnimator or by supplying it as an argument in the Object version of the factory method. To continue our earlier example animating Point values, you could use our new PointEvaluator class above to complete that code:
Point p0 = new Point(0, 0); Point p1 = new Point(100, 200); ValueAnimator anim = ValueAnimator.ofObject(new PointEvaluator(), p0, p1);
One of the ways that you might use this interface is through the ArgbEvaluator implementation, which is included in the Android SDK. If you animate a color property, you will probably either use this evaluator automatically (which is the case if you create an animator in an XML resource and supply colors as values) or you can set it manually on the animator as described in the previous section.
But Wait, There's More!
There's so much more to the new animation system that I haven't gotten to. There's the repetition functionality, the listeners for animation lifecycle events, the ability to supply multiple values to the factory methods to get animations between more than just two endpoints, the ability to use the Keyframe class to specify a more complex time/value sequence, the use of PropertyValuesHolder to specify multiple properties to animate in parallel, the LayoutTransition class for automating simple layout animations, and so many other things. But I really have to stop writing soon and get back to working on the code. I'll try to post more articles in the future on some of these items, but also keep an eye on my blog at graphics-geek.blogspot.com for upcoming articles, tutorials, and videos on this and related topics. Until then, check out the API demos, read the overview of Property Animation posted with the 3.0 SDK, dive into the code, and just play with it.
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The first tablets running Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) will be hitting the streets on Thursday Feb. 24th, and we’ve just posted the full SDK release. We encourage you to test your applications on the new platform, using a tablet-size AVD.
Developers who’ve followed the Android Framework’s guidelines and best practices will find their apps work well on Android 3.0. This purpose of this post is to provide reminders of and links to those best practices.
Moving Toward Honeycomb
There’s a comprehensive discussion of how to work with the new release in Optimizing Apps for Android 3.0. The discussion includes the use of the emulator; most developers, who don’t have an Android tablet yet, should use it to test and update their apps for Honeycomb.
While your existing apps should work well, developers also have the option to improve their apps’ look and feel on Android 3.0 by using Honeycomb features; for example, see The Android 3.0 Fragments API. We’ll have more on that in this space, but in the meantime we recommend reading Strategies for Honeycomb and Backwards Compatibility for advice on adding Honeycomb polish to existing apps.
Specifying Features
There have been reports of apps not showing up in Android Market on tablets. Usually, this is because your application manifest has something like this:
The new environment is different from what we’re used to in two respects. First, you can hold the devices with any of the four sides up and Honeycomb manages the rotation properly. In previous versions, often only two of the four orientations were supported, and there are apps out there that relied on this in ways that will break them on Honeycomb. If you want to stay out of rotation trouble, One Screen Turn Deserves Another covers the issues.
The second big difference doesn’t have anything to do with software; it’s that a lot of people are going to hold these things horizontal (in “landscape mode”) nearly all the time. We’ve seen a few apps that have a buggy assumption that they’re starting out in portrait mode, and others that lock certain screens into portrait or landscape but really shouldn’t.
A Note for Game Developers
A tablet can probably provide a better game experience for your users than any handset can. Bigger is better. It’s going to cost you a little more work than developers of business apps, because quite likely you’ll want to rework your graphical assets for the big screen.
There’s another issue that’s important to game developers: Texture Formats. Read about this in Game Development for Android: A Quick Primer, in the section labeled “Step Three: Carefully Design the Best Game Ever”.
We've also added a convenient way to filter applications in Android Market based on the texture formats they support; see the documentation of <supports-gl-texture> for more details.
Happy Coding
Once you’ve held one of the new tablets in your hands, you’ll want to have your app not just running on it (which it probably already does), but expanding minds on the expanded screen. Have fun!
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We are pleased to announce that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers. The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market. The new API level is 11.
Together with the new platform, we are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0). Key features include:
UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
New Palette with categories and rendering previews. (details)
More accurate rendering of layouts to more faithfully reflect how the layout will look on devices, including rendering status and title bars to more accurately reflect screen space actually available to applications.
Selection-sensitive action bars to manipulate View properties.
Zoom improvements (fit to view, persistent scale, keyboard access) (details).
Improved support for <merge> layouts, as well as layouts with gesture overlays.
Traceview integration for easier profiling from ADT. (details)
Tools for using the Renderscript graphics engine: the SDK tools now compiles .rs files into Java Programming Language files and native bytecode.
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[This post is by R. Jason Sams, an Android engineer who specializes in graphics, performance tuning, and software architecture. —Tim Bray]
Renderscript is a key new Honeycomb feature which we haven’t yet discussed in much detail. I will address this in two parts. This post will be a quick overview of Renderscript. A more detailed technical post with a simple example will be provided later.
Renderscript is a new API targeted at high-performance 3D rendering and compute operations. The goal of Renderscript is to bring a lower level, higher performance API to Android developers. The target audience is the set of developers looking to maximize the performance of their applications and are comfortable working closer to the metal to achieve this. It provides the developer three primary tools: A simple 3D rendering API on top of hardware acceleration, a developer friendly compute API similar to CUDA, and a familiar language in C99.
Renderscript has been used in the creation of the new visually-rich YouTube and Books apps. It is the API used in the live wallpapers shipping with the first Honeycomb tablets.
The performance gain comes from executing native code on the device. However, unlike the existing NDK, this solution is cross-platform. The development language for Renderscript is C99 with extensions, which is compiled to a device-agnostic intermediate format during the development process and placed into the application package. When the app is run, the scripts are compiled to machine code and optimized on the device. This eliminates the problem of needing to target a specific machine architecture during the development process.
Renderscript is not intended to replace the existing high-level rendering APIs or languages on the platform. The target use is for performance-critical code segments where the needs exceed the abilities of the existing APIs.
It may seem interesting that nothing above talked about running code on CPUs vs. GPUs. The reason is that this decision is made on the device at runtime. Simple scripts will be able to run on the GPU as compute workloads when capable hardware is available. More complex scripts will run on the CPU(s). The CPU also serves as a fallback to ensure that scripts are always able to run even if a suitable GPU or other accelerator is not present. This is intended to be transparent to the developer. In general, simpler scripts will be able to run in more places in the future. For now we simply leverage the CPU resources and distribute the work across as many CPUs as are present in the device.
The video above, captured through an Android tablet’s HDMI out, is an example of Renderscript compute at work. (There’s a high-def version on YouTube.) In the video we show a simple brute force physics simulation of around 900 particles. The compute script runs each frame and automatically takes advantage of both cores. Once the physics simulation is done, a second graphics script does the rendering. In the video we push one of the larger balls to show the interaction. Then we tilt the tablet and let gravity do a little work. This shows the power of the dual A9s in the new Honeycomb tablet.
Renderscript Graphics provides a new runtime for continuously rendering scenes. This runtime sits on top of HW acceleration and uses the developers’ scripts to provide custom functionality to the controlling Dalvik code. This controlling code will send commands to it at a coarse level such as “turn the page” or “move the list”. The commands the two sides speak are determined by the scripts the developer provides. In this way it’s fully customizable. Early examples of Renderscript graphics were the live wallpapers and 3d application launcher that shipped with Eclair.
With Honeycomb, we have migrated from GL ES 1.1 to 2.0 as the renderer for Renderscript. With this, we have added programmable shader support, 3D model loading, and much more efficient allocation management. The new compiler, based on LLVM, is several times more efficient than acc was during the Eclair-through-Gingerbread time frame. The most important change is that the Renderscript API and tools are now public.
The screenshot above was taken from one of our internal test apps. The application implements a simple scene-graph which demonstrates recursive script to script calling. The Androids are loaded from an A3D file created in Maya and translated from a Collada file. A3D is an on device file format for storing Renderscript objects.
Later we will follow up with more technical information and sample code.
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Several weeks ago we released Android 2.3, which introduced several new forms of communication for developers and users. One of those, Near Field Communications (NFC), let developers get started creating a new class of contactless, proximity-based applications for users.
NFC is an emerging technology that promises exciting new ways to use mobile devices, including ticketing, advertising, ratings, and even data exchange with other devices. We know there’s a strong interest to include these capabilities into many applications, so we’re happy to announce an update to Android 2.3 that adds new NFC capabilities for developers. Some of the features include:
A comprehensive NFC reader/writer API that lets apps read and write to almost any standard NFC tag in use today.
Advanced Intent dispatching that gives apps more control over how/when they are launched when an NFC tag comes into range.
Some limited support for peer-to-peer connection with other NFC devices.
We hope you’ll find these new capabilities useful and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovative apps that you will create using them.
Android 2.3.3 is a small feature release that includes a new API level, 10. Going forward, we expect most devices shipping with an Android 2.3 platform to run Android 2.3.3 (or later). For an overview of the API changes, see the Android 2.3.3 Version Notes. The Android 2.3.3 SDK platform for development and testing is available through the Android SDK Manager.
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Get Google Maps with Navigation (Beta), Places with Hotpot, and Latitude
*Navigation: Free, voice-guided GPS navigation system
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*Latitude: See friends on the map and check in at places
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√ Identifies unsecure device settings and advise how to fix them.
√ Ensures emails, contacts, bookmarks and text messages are securely safe
√ Checks media files for malicious software and security threats
√ Can be run daily, weekly, or on demand
Backup (Beta version)
Back up contacts, call logs, bookmarks, text and media messages to your SD card
Phone locator
√ Locate your lost or stolen phone and help you find it via Google maps
√ Turn your phone GPS on remotely and have the device send its location using GPS
√ Lock your phone remotely via our Mobile Control Panel or by sending SMS to your phone to protect your data
√ Set a lock screen message to help the locator find you
√ Make your device ring even if your phone is on salient mode
Task killer
Eliminate tasks that slow down or freeze up your device
App locker
Lock apps to protect your privacy
Local wipe
Wipe contacts, text messages, photos, browser history, calendar and wipe the SD card
You can surf the web, play music, chat, check weather, send SMS, read news, download a ring tone feeling secure when our security anti-virus is installed on your phone
Find more information on our free mobile antivirus solution on our web site www.droidsecurity.com
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Flash Player is a runtime plug-in for your device browser that enables a FULL web browsing experience on your device including access to your favorite videos, games and interactive content. Having Flash Player on your device gives you freedom to access the same immersive content you experience on a desktop PC anywhere, anytime.
The Full Web experience with Flash Player enables consumers to get more from their devices:
• Uncompromised browsing without ‘empty boxes’.
• Access to rich content, instead of being limited to stripped down “m-sites” (Most m-sites offer the option to navigate to their full sites).
• A more immersive, richer experience for games, video, and productivity anywhere.
By clicking “Install” I agree to the License Agreement terms at http://adobe.com/go/eum. Manage your privacy settings at https://settings.adobe.com/flashplayer/mobile. Download
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The #1 Twitter app for Android with the most features of ANY Twitter app. And the only app with “Zip It”!
Millions of downloads!
New innovations:
* Zip It – zip annoying tweeters or Twitter trends from your timeline without unfollowing
* Instapaper support – Save long stories to Instapaper to read later
* Color code tweets – Choose a custom color for your tweets and mentions
Plus the most features, all for FREE:
* Simultaneously post to Twitter and Facebook
* Multiple Twitter account support
* Multiple widgets
* Retweet with or without comment
* Twitlonger service
* Conversation thread view
* Twitter lists
* Customized Twitter notifications Download
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Frustrated with the built-in Messaging application? Want more features? Then chompSMS is for you, with lots of extra features like chat-style bubbles, contact pictures, quick reply, signatures, templates, blacklisting, heaps of customizations, themes and much more!
You can simply use chompSMS as a souped-up replacement to the built-in Messaging application, just with a heap more features and customizations.
Plus, if your mobile carrier charges a lot for texting (internationally for example) you can buy chompSMS credits to send much cheaper text messages. Of course if your friends are also using chompSMS, then all text messages between you are completely FREE!
Does it cost me anything?
The chompSMS application is completely free, with no obligation to buy anything from us.
For text messages between your friends using chompSMS, it’s FREE with no charge from us or your mobile carrier.
You only need to buy chompSMS credits if our rates are cheaper than your mobile carrier. Our rates are the same to any supported country in the world regardless of origin or destination. Otherwise simply use this great app for free and enjoy! Download
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Movies by Flixster. The #1 app for movie reviews, trailers and showtimes.
- Get showtimes for the top box office movies
- View local theaters
- Browse 65,000 DVDs
- Watch 15,000 trailers
- Read reviews from Rotten Tomatoes
- Add and manage your Netflix queue
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We've been listening to user feedback and will have the new version 2.0 out shortly. Thanks for all the support!
If you love MySpace, you’re really going to love MySpace Mobile for Android. Download the free application to stay connected with your friends... anytime, anyplace!
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Free,Featured File manager & Appmanager & taskkiller which explores PHONE & PC
*copy/cut move
*thumbnails
*multiselect
*edit text
*manage apps
*multiple send
*search
*(de)compress
*media on ftp
*access home PC
*bluetooth
KW:file manager file explorer file browser file viewer app manager task man
Package: com.estrongs.android.pop
Tags: es file explorer, es file explorer android, es file explorer download, es file explorer android download, estrongs file explorer, ... Download
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Get a faster, more cost-efficient mobile web browser. This browser uses powerful servers to compress data by up to 90% before sending it to your phone, so page loads are lightning fast in the browser. Try Opera Mini mobile browser today; it is completely free.
Package: com.opera.mini.android
Tags: opera mini download android, opera mini android screenshot, opera for android mid, download opera mini 5.1.1.jar, opera mini 5.1.1 jar download, ... Download
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New! Street View smart navigation -- move around by dragging "Pegman" where you want to go.
Try Street View on Google Maps to view street-level imagery from your phone.
To use Street View, open Google Maps, search for a place or long-press the map, and tap the Street View option.
Package: com.google.android.street
Tags: google street view download, street view on google maps for android download, try street view on google maps, try street view, download street level maps, ...
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Advanced Task Killer is also known as ATK. It is a tool to kill applications running.
*Uninstall,reinstall and restart your phone can solve Froyo issues, Long press go to 'Force Stop'*
KW: taskiller taskkiller task killer taskmanager manager panel taskpanel process app
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Pandora Radio is your own FREE personalized radio now available to stream music on your phone. Start with the name of one of your favorite artists, songs or classical composers and Pandora will create a "station" that plays their music and more music like it. Already a Pandora User? Just log in to enjoy your stations.
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Facebook for Android makes it easy to stay connected and share with friends. Share status updates from your home screen, chat with your friends, check out your News Feed, review your upcoming Events, look at your friends’ walls and user info, check in to Places to get Deals, upload Photos, share links, check your Messages, and watch videos.
Package: com.facebook.katana
Tags: facebook for android download, facebook for android, facebook, download facebook for android, facebook android download, ...
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Play LIVE against your friends! Choose a seat at a 5 or 9 person table with blinds up to a million chips or compete in Sit-N-Go tournaments. Win up to $1 million chips in the Daily Lottery! New and improved with faster downloading, smaller file size, and ability to save to SD card.
Package: com.zynga.livepoker
Tags: zynga poker android, zynga poker widget, zynga poker embedded, zynga poker embed, zinga poker doanload, ...
Recently changed in this version
Improved with better loading, smaller file size, and ability to save to SD card! Download
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"The carefuly crafted presentation makes Inferno enormously attractive" - PocketGamer
As Dante, the heart-broken hero, you embark on an epic adventure. Dante Inferno:
- 121 levels
- 14 achievements
- >6 hours of fun
- 2 endings
- customizable controls
Get Dante Inferno NOW
Package: com.javaground.danteinferno
Tags: the inferno android, dante the inferno android, the inferno game, dante android game, android the inferno, ...
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Start as a lowly vampire and become the most powerful vampire lord!
FEATURES:
- Massively Multiplayer ONLINE Vampire Game!
- Join over 2.5 million players!
Package: com.storm8.vampires12
Tags: vampires live android, vampire live android, vampires live for android, vampire live for android, vampires live android download, ... Download
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EAGLE NEST Best Shooting Game
Prepare to join the eagle nest?
Best training camp for newbie. Get your honor and glory here.
Provides 3 training mode:
*handgun in room training
*shotgun trapshooting
*AK-47
Start to get more points and levels.
Enjoy yourself in this best shooting game and feedback us if any suggestion.
To download visit here
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A jump-and-run game in the style of Super Mario and similar games. It has 12 levels of increasing difficulty.
The game can be controlled using keyboard (preferred), touchscreen, orientation sensor or trackball. Use 'Edit Settings' to customize.
Ad-supported version. App permissions required for ads and Scoreloop features.
Package: de.joergjahnke.mario.android.free
Tags: mobile andrio, mobile andrio (free), mobile andrlo, mobile andrio free, mobil andrio, ...
Recently changed in this version
-implemented a new joystick-like controller (the old one can be selected via the Edit Settings dialog, if you like it more)
-endless mode: restart with the first level after level 12, but with higher monster speed
-updates for the Russian and Ukrainian translation
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If you have got a Nook Color, then you will be surprised that you can now install the latest version of Android operating system which is Honey Comb 3.0. Please note that before we proceed on the installation process, make sure that you have created a backup of all the applications and all other data which is there on your device as you will lose all data on your Nook color.
Please note that some of the functionalities won’t work like Sound playback, DSP, hardware decoding, though many of the functionalities work like Graphics acceleration, Accelerometer, WiFi, touch buttons, touch screen and sleep / wakeup functionality
Procedure to to install Android 3.0 Honeycomb on Nook Color:
* First of all you will need to download the Nook HoneyComb image from here and then you will have to unzip by using WinZip onto your computer.
* Now, ensure that you have at least an 4GB or preferably 8GB one so that the system files can be easily accommodated.
* If you are using a Windows based computer then you will be requiring the WinImage, just download this and install the same, after which under the Disk option, choose Restore Virtual Image to Physical Drive and change the files shown bottom part to all files and then select the file.
* If you are on Mac based systems then you need to open the terminal window and first you will have to find in which drive the sd card is mapped on to and then you will have to type in the terminal, please note that you are identifying the right SD card and not the hard disk.
Unmount the drive by typing the below command:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#
(check with your disk number, if its disk2 then in the above command too you will have to make changes)
* Next computer will say to unmount of all volumes on disk was successful
Now, type in the following command,
dd if=nookhoney01.img of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m
Now, you will have to copy in the card.
* After copying, you will now have to turn off your Nook, insert the microSD card, and that’s it you will see that your Nook color is running the latest Android operating system that’s Honeycomb 3.0.
Source by http://androidadvices.com/how-to-install-android-3-0-honeycomb-on-nook-color/
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1. Tab, not Windows
When using a browser on the Android smart phone, users can only access one website address on one main page. While Android Honeycomb allows users to access the various site address on one main page by using tabs. Thus, the experience of browsing on the tablet just like accessing the site via a desktop computer.
2. Easily access your Gmail account plus "Action Bar"
Android OS which has been "officially" running on the smartphone display messages in Gmail e-mail accounts in one long column. While Android Honeycomb will divide the message into two columns so that users are easier to manage messages. There are also features "Action Bar" which will always be present when the user is using an application to move messages from folder to folder.
3. Supports three-dimensional graphics
Able to display more detailed Google Map service and in three dimensions.
4. Additional features for the enterprise
Tablet that uses Google's Android operating system Honeycomb supports special applications that apply to certain companies and have adequate security systems, such as data encryption and passwords.
5. Complete Virtual Keyboard
Google redesigned the keyboard in tablet form that runs with Android Honeycomb. The keyboard can also display special characters, such as when users press the e key, it will exit option letter e, such as "é," "ë," or "ê."
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A funny thing happened after Google posted (and subsequently pulled) its Android 3.0 Honeycomb video: T-Mobile celebrated its G-Slate announcement by posting the same video. Today it was made official during Verizon's keynote, with Google itself narrating a hands-on demo. We've scrutinized these videos to no end and we think we've come up with the most complete picture of Google's tablet OS experience at this point. Overview. We learned today at the Verizon keynote that former webOS design guru (now a Google UX Director) Matias Duarte played a big part in the art direction, and frankly, that's a very good thing. The new interface shows a near-unified aesthetic, a marked improvement over what we've seen so far from Android.After all the live wallpapers we've born witness to since Eclair hit the scene, it was actually a bit of a surprise that this blue-tinted background is completely static in every video. Physical buttons have been eschewed in favor of more pixelated fare. The top left has Google text and voice search, bottom left has back, home, and app switch buttons. There's also a revised calendar look that just like Gmail lets you scroll through items from the home screen, a new browser widget, a revised contact widget, and what looks to a stack of YouTube links that shuffle through what we'd guess is a finger flick downward.
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[Python] JavaHelper 2.00 EN by Rebel@POPDA
Also known as JavaTools
Last updated on 09/11/2010
Supplier: tengge
Language: Eng (translated by Rebel@POPDA)
Status: Free
Unpacking and packing jar files, editing class files, replacement sending paid SMS to an invalid number…
There is a search for all class files with the replacement of contents and an online translator. Decompressed files will store in E: Data_tengge_imya archive.
Unpacking jar files takes some time, be patient and everything will turn out.
New:
* Two methods of hacking games
* View Character encoding: utf8, utf7, GBK, big5 … (Of ten)
* Screenshoter.
Fits and works with drives C, E Download
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Socially is a mobile phone application that lets you keep track of all the friends you are connected to on multiple social networks. You can use Socially to track recent activity of friends on different social networks. Socially also shows you up-to-date social information about the callers during an incoming call and as alerts on the phone desktop (home) screen, enabling you to have better conversations.
With Socially you can:
# Manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare from one single client
# Update your status, view updates, see wall, comment, tweet, retweet - the whole works
# See Caller's social profile on incoming calls
# Get Desktop Notifications of activities on your social networks
# Sync your phone Address Book with your friends' Facebook, LinkedIn profiles...
# and much more...
What's new:
# Foursquare: Location check-in prompts on desktop re-released
# Fixed bug that caused some users to see "Incorrect signature" error while posting tweets
# Fixed bug in Replying to Twitter Direct Messages
# Minor bug fixes related to Twitter search and posting location on Twitter Download Here
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Application Symbian S^3 /
Internet Tool And Browser OS9
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Use the screen as a flashlight with 7 different colors or to flash SOS. It takes no extra space in your pocket and is always with you. Use it as night light, to send morse code or why not guide an aircraft on the taxi way. New in this version is a SOS button, that makes the phone flash SOS in morse code. Get it now, it could save your life one day.. Recommended to install on C : Phone memory
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Application Symbian S^3
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Let's begin the WAR of Mascots from UniX! They'll represent your favorite free software titles while battling it out in the arena using dynamite, grenades, baseball bats and other bazookas...
Exterminate your opponent in a 2D environment with toon-style scenery.
Each player controls the team of his choice (penguin, gnu, firefox, wilber,...) and must destroy his adversary using more or less casual weapons.
Although a minimum of strategy is required to vanquish, WarMUX is pre-eminently a "convivial mass murder" game where, turn by turn, each member of each team attempts to produce a maximum of damage to his opponents.
Here is a more complete changelog:
* Name and numbering (year.month) change!
* Symbian^3 port (number of characters/teams subject to memory constraint)
* More toonesque than ever characters! Cuteness not considered a weapon
* New maps: Japan-themed "ninja", nature-themed "Birds" and Space-themed "urban heights"
* Increased number of teams playable in a single game to 8
* Massive memory optimizations, and 16 bits-per-pixel rendering
* Massive speed optimization allowing better gameplay
* Help is now much richer; please help us translate it even more!
* Widget in options menu to edit keybindings
* Kinetic scrolling to browse the map
* Traditional in-game toolbar clickable, click wind indicator to display touch controls!
* Improved minimap: now displays boxes, can be resized through keyboard shortcuts, can be clicked to move around faster
* Custom teams
You have read this article Application Symbian OS 9.4 /
Application Symbian S^3
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