New Android SDK Yields Improved User Interface

[Craig]

Gizmodo has shots of the latest Android build and some of the sexiness that is its new user interface. This looks better and better...I hope they keep improving it.

New user interface - As I mentioned when we introduced the m3 version of the Android SDK, we're continuing to refine the UI that's available for Android. m5-rc14 replaces the previous placeholder with a new UI, but as before, work on it is still in-progress.

Layout animations - Developers can now create layout animations for their applications using the capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package. Check out the LayoutAnimation*.java files in the APIDemos sample code for examples of how this works.

Geo-coding - android.location.Geocoder enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code (i.e. translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa), and also search for businesses.

New media codecs - The MediaPlayer class has added support for the OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA audio file formats.

Updated Eclipse plug-in - A new version of ADT is available and provides improvements to the Android developer experience. In particular, check out the new Android Manifest editor.

[DominiKing]

This is great. I'm really pumped about the Android mobile os. I've been wanting to buy a new phone for a while now but nothing that's out has really interested me. There's cool phones out there but I don't like the UI and the way it runs so hopefully this could revolutionize mobile phones or at least start the road there. If they continue to work on this, by the time it'll get out it'll be a great system, I'll buy an iPhone or better to use with this.