Humor4u

Romain and I gave several talks at the excellent Devoxx conference in balmy Antwerp last November. The video of one of these talks, Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks and Techniques , has just been published for free on the Parleys.com site. All of the conference talks have been available for months to subscribers (79 Euros), but for those who haven't gotten around to registering quite yet, the talks are published incrementally for free throughout the year, and our UI Tips talk is now available. This talk covers a mix of topics, from "Garbage Zero" (techniques to avoid producing garbage when it matters) to an exploration of various tools and performance techniques that we use to produce better Android code. Check out the video here: Android UI Development: Tips, Tricks and Techniques .

I've given some talks about Android graphics recently, and the same questions keep coming up: What is Renderscript appropriate for? Is it a replacement for OpenGL rendering? How do I access Renderscript from NDK code? When do I choose between the different rendering options? Can I have a free tablet? It seemed to me that a brief article might help. In particular, I wanted to write something that lays out the various rendering options that Android provides and describes how we envision developers using them (and how we use them ourselves in the applications that we ship) so that you might better understand how and when to use them in your applications. Of course you're not bound to what we think; if you come up with new ways to use what the platform provides, all the better. But we can at least provide a little guidance to help you navigate the myriad of options. Hopefully this article will help answer the questions above. Except for the last question about the free tablet - I c

INTERLUDE MIRAGE - Buildings and mountains appear in China Strange days indeed! Stay Tuned....

As turmoil and chaos engulf our world it is tempting to ponder both the enormity and nature of the events we are witnessing. From global socioeconomic collapse to bizarre and frightening climate shifts and escalating natural catastrophe and calamity, it seems any form of "stability" is now by the wayside. Is it all coincidental or is there some sort of intelligent motivation behind it all? There are several things I do not subscribe to, hope, luck and coincidence being three of them.  That being said, what could be behind it all, or at least some of the obvious bedlam we are experiencing on all fronts?  Although I do not profess to know as fact, we do have a couple of discussion points which may address the bulk of it. In the matter of economic disaster the formation of what is known popularly as the New World Order, (now a confirmed reality) is certainly highly suspect in the demise of social order and economic collapse.  Although the NWO is unlikely to be influencing the so

The property animation capabilities that are in Android 3.0 (described in the article Animation in Honeycomb ) represent a good building block for powerful animation capabilities in the platform. But we're not stopping there. One minor addition to the platform was added in the 3.1 release, ViewPropertyAnimator. This class allows very easy and efficient one-liner animations of some of the new View properties like alpha, rotation, and scaleX/Y. Check out the Introducing ViewPropertyAnimator article on the Android developer blog for more about this new API. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser trailer that shows the demo described in the article. The interesting part is the code (shown in the article , not here). And the soundtrack, of course: turn up your speakers.