ANDROID
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Android runs on a variety of devices that offer different screen sizes and densities. For applications, the Android system provides a consistent development environment across devices and handles most of the work to adjust each application's user interface to the screen on which it is displayed. At the same time, the system provides APIs that allow you to control your application's UI for specific screen sizes and densities, in order to optimize your UI design for different screen configurations. For example, you might want a UI for tablets that's different from the UI for handsets. Although the system performs scaling and resizing to make your application work on different screens, you should make the effort to optimize your application for different screen sizes and densities.
Supporting Multiple Screens
Designer’s Guide to Supporting Multiple Android Device Screens
Unlike iPhones, Android devices do not have the same company developing both the software and hardware. This leads to different combinations of screen sizes, resolutions and DPIs and creates quite a challenge when designing and developing for these devices. While the iPhone 3G/S and iPhone 4 have different resolutions and DPI, they share the same screen size and the resolutions follow the same aspect ratio. Therefore, an image can be created to fit the iPhone 4’s specifications and be nicely down-scaled to the iPhone 3G/S. Credit to Steve Jobs for planning ahead and designing his phone with developers in mind.
For designers, Android is the elephant in the room when it comes to app design. As much as designers would like to think it’s an iOS world in which all anyones cares about are iPhones, iPads and the App Store, nobody can ignore that Android currently has the majority of smartphone market share and that it is being used on everything from tablets to e-readers . In short, the Google Android platform is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and brands are starting to notice.
Designing For Android - Smashing Magazine
Lock Screen Orientation in Android
This article describes how to force the orientation of an Android view not to change ie screen not to rotate. How to lock the orientation In the onCreateDialog(int) event of the activity use the setRequestedOrientation(int) method to set the screen orientation to your chosen setting. The activity will stay in this orientation regardless of if the device is tilted or not. How to detect the current orientation To programmatically detect the current orientation of the activity use the following code snippet.
Android Essentials: Adding Events to the User’s Calendar
The latest version of the Android SDK, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, reached developers this week. For the first time, the SDK provides access to the Calendar application in a legitimate fashion. One of the most common tasks that developers often want to be able to do is create new events in the user’s calendar, so today we’ll show you how. The Calendar is a common application that users rely upon on their Android devices.