Slashdot Mirror
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.
I heard my bother talking on the phone about this awhile ago... It seems like one of the most weird and random names to call something. I get it, code names are cool, and people readily recognize them. But you sound absolutely silly for doing so. Who wants to go to a meeting and tell their bosses that they're thinking of: "Replacing Honeycomb with Ice Cream Sandwich on all our android devices"?
Use the damn version numbers, PLEASE.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
is the miserable battery life. My droid Incredible goes barely a day and a half with little to no good smartphone usage. If I use the internet or video at all the battery is gone in less than a day. I even have all the default auto-running programs deleted. I will probably go back to iphone after this just because of its incredible battery life. I had the 3g and it was amazing.
I hear that complaint a lot, and even made it myself when I had an Evo4G. However, I found that if you disable all the features that are not present in the iPhone, like 4G, live wallpaper, widgets, flash, live weather, etc, I think you'll find the battery life to be comparable to what you had on your iPhone. My Evo3D is as good or better than my buddy's iPhone4 by simply turning off live wallpaper and 4G.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I do Android development, and I had a look at the SDK and emulator when it was released last night. I created an emulator and was testing my applications out on it.
The first thing I noticed is that there are more help screens. I believe they disappear after first use, but they tell users how to navigate around the phone. Or tablet as it may be - that's probably the biggest thing about ICS, it integrates Gingerbread (smartphones) and Honeycomb (tablets) into one OS. I've been getting the hang of Android layout, and it is not so hard once you get used to it, you just stick with the things they recommend - density-independent pixels, scale-independent pixels, objects sized by width and/or height by fill-parent (fill layout container object is in) or wrap-object (make object only as large as it need be), objects or layout containers being assigned by weight. One trick I learned - I start design with the smallest device - WVGA - a small device with a low number of dots per inch. I do a portrait (device held with more height than width), and if I have time a landscape (device held with more width than height) view. Sometimes that is enough, and those two layouts work from the smallest to largest devices. Usually it requires a little tweaking, especially Activity classes that make use of buttons. You take the layouts you made and increase text size, increase the distance between objects and other objects, or objects and the edge of the screen. Some people rethink the design, they use Fragments so that where something that would be done on a small screen with ten screen changes with ten different Activity views, is now done with five screen changes with the same ten different Activity views - you just use Fragments to put two or so Activity views per screen. The ICS smartphone/tablet integration will help in that department, although you can do it to some extent already. In fact Fragments were introduced in Honeycomb (the old tablet Android version, before this ICS tablet/smartphone integration), so some of this is just bringing Honeycomb advances back to the smartphone. Another example of this is the Actionbar - over time the Android designers realized it would help UI consistency, ease of programming etc. if they put a bar on top that let people do things (open an email, go to the next page, whatever). So Actionbar was in Honeycomb, now it is in ICS as well. I should mention there is a compatibility package which allows apps to use many (but not all) of these new features on older phones like Gingerbread, Froyo, Eclair etc.
The next thing I noticed when looking at my apps in the ICS emulator is the new Roboto font. It is said to be able to be a good font for everything from a small, low density to a large screen with a high density. Some of my apps use the Android non-default fonts, and the ones I looked at looked most the same, although there may have been small tweaks I did not notice. And Android lets you use your own fonts.
One of my applications runs in the background, doing a database search while updating a progress bar - and while all of this is happening, an ad is often being loaded as well via the web. It seems to be stalling on something in the ICS emulator, I will do some debugging later to see where it is getting stuck. It may be one of those cases where I was doing something wrong but Android allowed it, and they increased the strictness of things. With ICS's use of Fragments, I can probably just load one ad Fragment when my app starts and put that on every screen anyhow.
Regarding source code, I'm sure it will be released. It will be a month or so before you can buy a Samsung Galaxy Nexus anyhow. The sooner the release the better for me, but Android's open nature beats Windows 8 Mango and iOS any day. I can sit at my Linux box, use open source tools to develop everything, and then just push it out to Android Market (or some other market - Android does not lock phones to their store like Apple does). It is beyond me why Apple punishes developers with an app sto