Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By : Kyle Merrifield Mew
Book Image

Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook

By: Kyle Merrifield Mew

Overview of this book

<p>Android is a mobile operating system that runs on a staggering number of smartphones and tablets. Android offers developers the ability to build extremely rich and innovative applications written using the Java programming language. Among the number of books that have been published on the topic, what&rsquo;s missing is a thoroughly practical, hands-on book that takes you straight to getting your job done without boring you with too much theory.<br /><br />Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook will take you straight to the information you need to get your applications up and running. This book is written to provide you with the shortest possible route between an idea and a working application. <br /><br />Work through the book from start to finish to become an Android expert, or use it as a reference book by applying recipes directly to your project.<br /><br />This book covers every aspect of mobile app development, starting with major application components and screen layout and design, before moving on to how to manage sensors such as internal gyroscopes and near field communications. Towards the end, it delves into smartphone multimedia capabilities as well as graphics and animation, web access, and GPS. <br /><br />Whether you are writing your first app or your hundredth, this is a book that you will come back to time and time again, with its many tips and tricks on the rich features of Android 3.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Running 3.0 and higher applications on older platforms


The advent of Android 3.0 introduced some significant new features, aimed in particular at tablet devices. However, there are a large number of Android tablets that run on earlier platforms and so Google produced a compatibility package so that most of these new features would run on older versions, going back as far as Android 1.6 (API level 4).

This chapter has introduced a lot of new concepts but we can conclude it with a nice and easy example showing how to install the compatibility library and how to include packages from it, so that we can take advantage of these wonderful new features on older platforms.

Getting ready

There is a strong chance that you have already downloaded and installed the Android Compatibility Package during a regular software update of your SDK. All the same, open the AVD manager, select Installed packages, and check that you have; it will look like this:

How to do it....

  1. Having checked that the Compatibility...