Techie Madness

Android 4.0 for Users (source:  http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0-highlights.html ) Simple, beautiful, beyond smart Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing. Refined, evolved UI Focused on bringing the power of Android to the surface, Android 4.0 makes  common actions more visible and lets users navigate with simple, intuitive gestures. Refined  animations  and feedback throughout the system make interactions engaging and interesting. An entirely  new typeface  optimized for high-resolution screens improves readability and brings a polished, modern feel to the user interface. Virtual buttons in the System Bar let users navigate instantly to Back, Home, and Recent Apps. The  System Bar  and virtual buttons are present across all ap...

An Activity contains Views and ViewGroups. A View is a widget that has a appearance on the screen. A View derives from the base class android.view.View. One or more Views grouped into a ViewGroup. A ViewGroup(which itself is a type of View) provides layout in which you can order the sequence and appearance of the Views. A ViewGroup derives from the base class android.view.ViewGroup. Android supports the following groups: LinearLayout AbsoluteLayout TableLayout RelativeLayout FrameLayout ScrollView

Up to this point, you have seen that the basic unit of an Android application is an  Activity . An  Activity  displays the user interface of your application, which may contain widgets like buttons, labels, text boxes, etc. Typically, you define your UI using an XML file (for example, the  main.xml  file located in the  res/layout  folder), which may look like this: During runtime, you load the XML UI in the  onCreate()  event handler in your Activity class, using the  setContentView() method of the  Activity  class: What happens is that during compilation time, each element in the XML file is compiled into its equivalent Android GUI class, with attributes represented by methods. The Android system then creates the UI of the  Activity  when it is loaded. While it is always easier to build your UI using a XML file, there are times where you need to build your UI dynamically during runtime (for example,...

Android application consists of loosely coupled components, bound by the application manifest. This manifest file will describe about each component and how they all interact, as well as the application metadata including its hardware and platform requirements. For example : This manifest file will declare all activities, services, broadcast receivers and content provider of the application. It will also contain the required permissions for the application. For example if the application requires network access it must be specified here. "AndroidManifest.xml" can be thought as the deployment descriptor for an Android application.                                                                                 Figure 1-6 The "package" attribute defines the base package for the f...