Getting To Know Android 4.1, Part 3: Project Butter - How It Works And What It Added. Welcome back to GTKA, everyone's favorite investigative series where we learn all about the newest version of Android (with a heavy emphasis on "all"). The previous two episodes, if you didn't catch them, are here and here.
Today we'll be doing something a little different and looking at something near and dear to everyone's hearts: performance. Jelly Bean is crazy fast. Slap it on a Galaxy Nexus and it'll feel like a brand new phone. Scrolling is faster and smoother, and the touch response is hyper-sensitive. I'm sure you've all seen a sweeping overview of this, but those are boring. So how do you make an 8 month old Galaxy Nexus run like a Galaxy S III? VSync Turns Frame Drawing Into A Well-Oiled Machine PC Gamers are probably familiar with the term "VSync.
" To understand what exactly VSync is, we're going to need a quick display primer: Video (ie a phone display doing stuff) is made of individual pictures called "frames. " VSync, well, synchronizes things. New Animations. Ice Cream Sandwich supports USB game controllers and HDMI, turns your phone into full game console. Take that, Xperia Play.
USB gamepads are already supported in Honeycomb, so we had plenty of hope that Android 4.0 -- also lovingly referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich -- would offer the same functionality. We finally have the answer, and it's a resounding yes, courtesy of Google framework engineer Romain Guy's Twitter account. The cool part, though, is that HDMI's playing nice as well. In short, you could hook up an external gamepad to a USB-to-microUSB adapter on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, connect it to your TV and transform your handset into a fancy portable gaming console. Android 4.2.2 update reveals minor changes to Quick Settings and more. Sonoma Wire Works Wants To Fix The Android Audio Latency Problem. Sonoma Wire Works wants to fix the Android audio latency problem.
At the 2013 Winter NAMM Show, Sonoma Wire Works announced the development of a low-latency audio (LLA) solution for Android smartphones and other devices. Typical input to output latency on Android devices is between 100 and 250 milliseconds. The Android Lag Fix That Really Wasn't. New Android 4.2.2 Features: Toggle From Quick Settings, Better App Download Notifications, and Some New Sounds! Android 4.2.2 is out, and while an OCD-fueled 4.2.2 edition of Getting To Know Android is on the way, we figured it would be a good idea to highlight the big user facing changes that came with this release.
We already covered the new ADB Whitelist and posted the raw developer changelog, so this should be the last of the important stuff. First up is the new notification for in-progress app downloads, which now shows the percentage and an estimated time remaining for your app downloads while they are happening. Or, if you want to be technical about it: Calculate speed of in-progress downloads and estimate time remaininguntil completion. Getting To Know Android 4.1, Part 3: Project Butter - How It Works And What It Added.
Android Jelly Bean review: Project Butter. For us, the biggest improvement to Android Jelly Bean is also the least obvious – that is, until you actually start using a device running the OS.
Announced at Google IO 2012 as the curiously named "Project Butter," the engineers behind Jelly Bean have made a concerted effort to finally shake the lag and general lack of responsiveness Android has historically been known for. These claims are not just empty promises: For perhaps the first time ever, moving around within Android is just as smooth as iOS, whether it's from the smaller display of the Nexus 4, the seven inches of the Nexus 7 or on the larger Nexus 10. Google used a variety of methods to accomplish this feat, ranging from "vsync timing" (ensuring a consistent frame rate across all screen drawing and animation) to triple buffering, which appears to be the key component which results in an overall smoother feel across the user interface. Android, High-Performance Audio in 4.1, and What it Means – Plus libpd Goodness, Today. It’s called “Jelly Bean.” But a 4.1 version of Android might also be called, at last, a version of Android musicians will find tasty.
(Those last versions were a bit more of the disgusting variety from Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans; this is a bit more Jelly Belly.) Photo (CC-BY-SA) Hermann Kaser. Android devices may, at last, get the kind of sound performance that makes music and audio apps satisfying to use. We’ve suffered through generations of the OS and hardware that were quite the opposite.
If you’re using an app that involves sound or music, the performance of the underlying OS and hardware will make a big difference.