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Android Ice Cream Sandwich SDK Released
Hitting the front page for the first time, ttong writes "The highly anticipated Android 4.0 (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) has been released and finally brings the features of 3.x Honeycomb to smaller devices. Some of the highlights include: a revamped UI, a much faster browser, face unlock, a vastly improved camera app, improved task switching, streaming voice recognition, Wi-Fi Direct, and Bluetooth Health Device Profile. ... The API level is 14, download the new SDK here."
calc noted that the source code has yet to be released (Google account required) except to legally required GPL components. Supposedly progress is being made toward getting AOSP back online: "We're working on it and we're making good progress, but we're not ready to announce any additional details yet." How many of the new features will remain proprietary and tied to Google services remains to be seen.
So your rationale is that the API is horrible because they added in some bespoke classes?
I looked at the implementations of the alternative to many of the Collections classes in particular, and they had nothing in them that suggested they were "better suited to mobile devices". And I'm not going to dig through the API docs, but they were certainly no improvement on the equivalent Java classes, and I recall them often being less intuitive.
Er, if you don't want to use XML files to do your UI, you don't have to.
I know you can construct your UI directly in code, but virtually all the documentation I have seen assumes you'd never want to do that and omits coverage of it. Hence why I said the XML format was presented as "the preferred way".
This is not even true. The activity does not "restart"
The process is exactly the same as when the app is explicitly shutdown by the user or the app developers code, so it is true. That's why you have to store the current state of the application, as you allude to in your comment.
Nothing you've said supports this conclusion [that the development platform feels like a proof of concept]
Well, if you feel it's more than just adequate then I dread to think what your own code looks like. While I dislike the walled garden approach of Apple, from a purely technical point of view I love the iOS as a platform to develop for. I had high hopes that the Android SDK would be as pleasant to develop for, since it is a much more open platform, but I'm left hoping instead that someone comes up with an alternative.