Android Developer Labs for Melbourne

Luke and myself attended the first Android Developers Lab for 2012 in Melbourne recently.

The focus of the day was on Ice Cream Sandwich, Googles new version of the Android operating system. Google has invested a considerable amount of effort and money in their latest Android operating system offering. One of the great enhancements is the Roboto font, designed to scale well on different resolutions.

Ice Cream Sandwich aims to make Android apps uniquely Android. The question of "What should an Android application look like?" has officially been answered. The Android Design site was recently launched to illustrate and describe to developers how to design exceptional Android applications. This covers everything from writing style to the UI components and design patterns, such as the action bar and multi-pane layouts.

• http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

The first half of the day discussed the Android Design style, patterns and building blocks. This followed on with an introduction to new features, such as WiFi Direct and Near Field Communication, and the simplicity of the API's to use these features in your own applications.

After we convened for lunch, we delved in to the code lab for the day. The code lab project aimed to introduce developers to fragments, and leverage fragments to enable more flexibility with their applications. A typical Android application would have an activity for each user interface, fragments can be used to combine multiple user interfaces into a single user interface. This allows applications to be design and provide a more enriching user experiences for a range of different type of Android enabled devices.