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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.
Have they fixed the appalling development platform for programming Android apps? I've some experience of programming for the iPhone, and as I can already program in Java I thought I'd give Android programming a try late last year. The API is horrible - standard Java classes replaced by poorly designed alternatives for no apparent reason, those horrible XML files as the preferred way of designing a UI, and unavoidable casts all over the place. When I got to the bit in the tutorials about apps being forcibly restarted when the orientation changes I cried with laughter. It feels a proof of concept rather than a polished development platform, as though Google bought a work in progress and couldn't be arsed to finish it because they needed to get it out quick in order to compete with iOS. Compared to the best practices with regular Java programming, it's as though the Android SDK ignores all the lessons of the last twenty or more years of object oriented programming ...