Google's Obsession with Sweet Treats

Ice cream sandwich is Googles most ambitious version of Android to date and the reviews have been positive. Get an in-depth ride through Ice cream sandwich, what it has to offer and what the future holds of Android's next version Jellybean.

We will cover topics such as dealing with multiple screen sizes, Async Tasks, the new powerful animation framework and lastly we will look into what we can expect from Jellybean, Android 5.0.

Transcript

1. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com GOOGLE’S OBSESSION WITH SWEET TREATS
2. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com ICECREAM SANDWICH AND OTHER DELICIOUS THINGS
3. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com • 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?
4. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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
5. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
6. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com ACTIONBAR
7. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com SWIPING (VIEW PAGER) ➸ ➸
8. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com HOLO THEME
9. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
10. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
11. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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();
12. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com QUICK WALKTHROUGH PARALLAX Parallax is cool, everyone wants to do it and wants to know how. Lets walk through how to do a simple parallax effect using ObjectAnimator
13. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
14. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
15. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
16. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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
17. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
18. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
19. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com HOW TO USE ACTIONBAR • ActionBar a = getActionBar() • Actionbar uses the menuInflator and the onCreateOptionsMenu • Why? To support backwards compatibility. Do I like it? No.
20. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
21. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
22. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com FRAGMENTS • Android is fragmented, so they introduced Fragments. Heh heh. • Support large and small screen layouts.
23. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com ON A SINGLE SCREEN
24. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com ON A TABLET
25. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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
26. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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.
27. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
28. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com 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!
29. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com DEMO
30. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com FUTURE OF ANDROID Im not a Google employee so I have no idea. But I can make some educated guesses. PROS • 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. CONS • 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.
31. Faisal Abid @faisalabid www.faisalabid.com THANK YOU ANY QUERIES?