Android 3.0 Platform Preview and SDK Is Here 129
mikejuk writes "Google has released the Android 3.0 SDK, to allow developers time to create the apps that will run on the flood of tablet devices that should be availalble later in the year. The preview includes improved 2D and 3D graphics, new user interface controls, support for multicore processors, DRM and enterprise security features. It is complete with a 3.0 emulator that you can use to try applications on, but you can't add them to the app market just yet."
Better Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Any chance we'll get rid of Java? (Score:4, Informative)
Android has it's own VM system, and it's called Dalvik. It has language independence built in so Java source files can be used... they compile to DEX, the Dalvik bytecode format. It does JIT.
Please tell me that the above was (well-disguised) sarcasm.
Re:And for phones? (Score:4, Informative)
Honeycomb is for Tablets only. Ice cream will be the next phone OS.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
With a tablet android version, they might finally have gotten me into android app development. I'm not sure exactly how this works, would I have to learn and use java or could I just use any language?
If you have an existing C/C++ codebase it is possible to hive parts of it off as a library (.so) and load it into your java code via JNI, but for the most part your user interface has to be written in Java and compiled into Dalvik bytecode.
As of Android 2.3 it is apparently possible to write the entire program in C/C++, using a special option in the manifest file and an Android-specific entrypoint. 2.3 also adds event hooks to help with getting input, but AFAIK there is still no way to get at the user interface. You can, however, do OpenGL (probably OpenGL SE, but not sure) and roll your own, but that's generally most useful for games and things rather than, say, a text editor (which Android could use a few more of).
There are a few gotchas when using the Native Development Kit - it's got most of POSIX but not everything. pthreads is a little iffy in places and it doesn't support unicode properly (Android doesn't use Unicode, it does something else).
For example, passing a unicode string between C and C++ modules will cause a bus error, because unicode is 32 bits in C++, and 8 bits in C which caused a lot of head-scratching at first.
Re:This is where Nokia missed the boat (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it wasn't open-source enough. Many of the nasty bugs in the platform related to closed-source components. For example, I wanted to be able to simultaneously run a VoIP call and use the camera. But the camera "helpfully" wouldn't run during a call, because it needed the sound card to make the "click" noise. I tried to fix it, but was told that the camera app was closed source. There was an open-source camera library component...but only if I didn't want auto-focus! Another N900 killer was video-calling. Almost there, but pulse-audio was hogging 30% CPU doing (un-needed) sample-rate conversion - and we couldn't remove it.