Android Dev

"Ever wondered about Google play store UI which is built around cards. Card is nothing but a single row item of ListView or GridView. As depicted below, card can be of various sizes and can be either app card, movie, books, games or app suggestions card or birthday card or even it can be a simple list/grid item too. The main benefit of designing app with card UI is it gives consistent looks throughout the application, doesn't matter whether it gets loaded in mobile or tablet."

"Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse. The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets. The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users"

The post focuses on some great points which I believe Google should accept in their next update of Android version.

This site hosts a library for Near Field Communication on Android using the NDEF format.. In particular the site provides an eclipse plugin for the developers to create NDef records for various use cases - URI, Smartposter, Event etc. There is also an associated application hosted on Google Play store which is very useful in composing complex NDEF records and burning on Tags

The other big security enhancement introduced in Android 4.3 is a more robust way to store cryptographic credentials used to access sensitive information and resources. This means changes to the Android KeyChain, which stores digital certificates used to access Wi-Fi networks and virtual private networks used by large corporations and government agencies. With the keychain enhancements, the system-wide keys are bound to a hardware-based root of trust process devices that support this.The phone needs to have a secure element such as a Trusted Platform Module so that private keys can't be stolen even if the phone is rooted and the attacker has full access to the operating system. Phones that don't have this hardware capability will fall back to software protections for securing credentials.Enhancements to the Android Keystore, a similar resource that also stores credentials, allows users to create keys that can be accessed and used exclusively by a single application. Under version 4.3, "apps can create or store private keys that cannot be seen or used by other apps and can be added to the keystore without any user interaction A third enhancement is Android's ability to create secondary user profiles that implement fine-grained restrictions.

The was created for the purpose of optimizing Android layouts by reducing the number of levels in view trees.When the LayoutInflater encounters this tag, it skips it and adds the children to the parent.You can also use when you create a custom composite view. 

Holo Everywhere is an android library /extension to be able to use Holo theme on older android devices as well 

" I will walk through the 4 kinds of Relative Layout use cases. 1.Target view position in relation to parenting View Group (i.e. a layout container) 2.Target view alignment in relation to parenting View Group 3.Target view position in relation to another View 4.Target view alignment in relation to another View We'll use Jack and Jill buttons to demonstrate this. The first two categories are in relation to a parent layout (Jack and the parent view group). The last two categories show laying out in relation to another View (i.e. Jack + Jill)"