Monday, May 24, 2010

Application to SD card : it's working !!

Yesterday, I discovered that the applications should put a special tag in the manifest in order to let the user put them on the SD card.

Today, I tried it on Word Prospector, and
Tadaaa ! It's working great :






















(Here in french, obvisouly)

The move is instantaneous, completely transparent.
 And the application looks as fast as when running from the internal memory.
Nice !!

Additionnal note :
I love the Bug-Droid icon when you are connected for debugging !!!

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Installation of applications on the SD card with Froyo : the how- to !

Youpeee !!!
Froyo is finally here, sooner than I expected it !Thanks, Google !!!

Now, like every other geek with their new toy in hand, I tried most of the new things...
And all is great, but...
The install on SDCard is always greyed...

Then, I just read a tweet from Romain Guy explaining it in a few words.
Your application should add this line in the manifest

 xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:installLocation="auto"
    ... >

in order to be installed by the end user on the SD Card.

http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/appendix/install-location.html

Friday, May 21, 2010

libraries in Android : the new feature no body speak about in the SDK

Hi all,

This Google I/O has been rich in announces and new and nice features.

So everybody is speaking about :
*  flash : This is really nice, and a big plus for Android ( no, I didn't mention the Fruit Phone... )
* performances : x2 - x5 for free is always good for developers. It also seems the general OS has been improved in this direction.
* Teethering
* Installation on SD card ( the size of applications will now explode !! )
* Cloud to device messenging : this is like the push function in the Fruit Phone, but one step further, as it use the intent system, and can launch some application from the Cloud...
* Application Backup Data : This is nice. Some developers were already doing it on their side, but having it included in the SDK is really a big plus.


But there is a little new feature that I was waiting for for such a long time, and that is totally unexpected :
The project Libraries !!

Project libraries are basically, Android libraries, with code and resources included.
This is awesome !!

It means that now, we can finally have one common code for a free and a paid application !
In my case, I have 2 different application for the english and the french version of my game, I will now have only one version !

Here is the thing :
http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/guide/developing/eclipse-adt.html#libraryProject

And there is a sample :
http://developer.android.com/intl/fr/resources/samples/TicTacToeMain/index.html

Enjoy !!!