Google's Obsession with Sweet Treats. What's new in ICS and the Future of Android

transcript

Faisal Abid @faisalabidwww.faisalabid.com

GOOGLE’S OBSESSION WITH SWEET TREATS

ICECREAM SANDWICH AND OTHER DELICIOUS THINGS

• Software Developer working with Android

since the beta days

• Previously a Flex/Flash and ColdFusion developer.

• Co-Author Flex 3 in Action

• Currently apart from Android, heavily involved in

the Node.js and CoffeeScript community.

• Entrepreneur, Author, Teacher & Developer

WHO AM I?

ABOUT THIS TALK

What’s cool in 3.0/4.0

• Design Guidelines

• Animation Framework

• ActionBar Framework

• Fragments

• New Views

• Dialog Fragments

The Future of Android Development

DESIGN GUIDELINES

Previous versions of Android looked like crap. There I said it.

• ICS looks beautiful.

• ICS focuses on simplicity

• Bye bye menu button

• Bye bye hardware keys

ICS is designed for multiple screens.

Flat look. Easy to scale.

ACTIONBAR

SWIPING (VIEW PAGER)➸

HOLO THEME

ANIMATION FRAMEWORK

• Previous versions of Android did not do animations well

• I hated the anim.xml files for simple animations

• With Honeycomb, Android introduced .animate()

on all views.

OBJECTANIMATOR, VALUEANIMATOR

• .animate() is powerful, but ObjectAnimator and

ValueAnimator are even more powerful.

• ObjectAnimator allows you to animate any property

of an object

objectAnimatorNext = ObjectAnimator.ofFloat(this, “translationX”, 100f);

objectAnimatorNext.setInterpolator(new DecelerateInterpolator());

objectAnimatorNext.start();

QUICK WALKTHROUGH

PARALLAXParallax is cool, everyone wants to do it

and wants to know how.

Lets walk through how to do a simple parallax

effect using ObjectAnimator

SUMMARY HOW IT WORKS

• Foreground has to be faster.

• ObjectAnimator animates it forward and backwards

• Check if Animation already running to prevent it going nuts

• To make it usable in the real world you will need to fix the

edges of the imageview so that it doesn’t overflow.

VALUEANIMATOR

• Not all views have all the properties ready to be animated

using .animate()

• ValueAnimator will handle the rest for you.

• Animates the values from x to y.

VALUEANIMATOR

That’s cool but how do I animate it?• So we ran it. But.. It didn’t do anything. It knows nothing of

the progressbar.

• Enter onAnimateUpdateListener

ACTIONBAR

• Bigger screens, thumb easier to click on top.

• Android introduced ActionBar in Honeycomb,

but ICS makes it much more cooler.

• ActionBar can support multiple screen resolution

with ease.

HOW TO USE ACTIONBAR

• ActionBar a = getActionBar()

• Actionbar uses the menuInflator and the

onCreateOptionsMenu

• Why? To support backwards compatibility.

Do I like it? No.

IFROOM | WITHTEXT

• One thing I like very much is the IfRoom|WithText

parameters.

• If the screen is small, they will just appear in the

overflow icon for GalaxyNexus+ or in the menu on

phones with hardware keys.

FRAGMENTS

• Android is fragmented, so they introduced Fragments. Heh heh.

• Support large and small screen layouts.

ON A SINGLE SCREEN

ON A TABLET

GRIDLAYOUT AND SPACE

• ICS introduces two new Views.

• GridLayout and Space

• Gridlayout lets you get an amazing layout structure while

space, well spaces out your layout

GRIDLAYOUT

• Previous, we used LinearLayout, FrameLayout and

a combination of other Layouts to get a pretty cool

UI done.

• With GridLayout, we can achieve the same without

multiple views

• Less views = faster load times.

DIALOG FRAGMENT

• Recently introduced

• DialogFragment gets rid of the ugly onCreateDialog(int)

No more case switching for no reason.

• Scales perfectly on all phone sizes

• Easy to use. You can pass listeners objects to the dialog

for notification results!

FUTURE OF ANDROID

Im not a Google employee so I have no idea. But I can make

some educated guesses.

• Better API support for Cloud.

• Siri altnerative with an open API

• More Focus on Gaming. Android

Game Center? OpenFient Acquisition?

• More options for TV development,

Google Glasses Integration.

• More and More phones. Android is

growing at a crazy rate. Which means

more trouble for developers to port on

different phones.

• Which means Bad android reviews and

discouragement to develop further.

• iPhone starts to look very promising in

this scenario.

THANK YOUANY QUERIES?

Google's Obsession with Sweet Treats. What's new in ICS and the Future of Android

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