M5-rc14, An Update to Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android

Android, the open-source mobile platform from Google, was shining at this week's World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where some prototypes were displayed to attendees. Also a new Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android was released on Wednesday.

Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen, wrote on the Android Developers Blog, that the newest SDK, called M5-rc14, provides updates to the application programming interfaces (APIs) and developer tools.

He mentioned;

"There are a couple of changes in m5-rc14 I'd like to highlight:

• 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."

Go get your Android

tag: Google’s Android, Android Developers, M5-rc14,