Book Image

Android 4: New Features for Application Development

By : Murat Aydin
Book Image

Android 4: New Features for Application Development

By: Murat Aydin

Overview of this book

<p>Recently, with the increasing popularity of mobile phones, mobile operating systems have emerged and quickly spread. Now people with smart phones can do everything that they can do with their computers. The popularity of the Android mobile operating system has increased and is widely used. In this book, new features and innovations of Android 4.0 will be discussed.<br /><br />"Android 4: New Features for Application Development" is a practical and hands-on guide for developing android applications using new features of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) with a step-by-step approach and clearly explained sample codes. You will learn the new APIs in Android 4.0 with sample code.<br /><br />This book will cover the new features and APIs of Android 4.0 (Android Ice Cream Sandwich). It will show the usage of the new APIs with a step-by-step approach and clearly explained sample code.<br /><br />You will learn about the new user interface components such as Action Bar and GridLayout. You will also learn about new APIs for social media integration and accessing calendar data. We will also look at new connectivity APIs such as Wi-Fi Direct and Android Beam. Supporting multiple screen sizes and multiple versions of Android is also among the subjects that you will learn.<br /><br />You can use "Android 4: New Features for Application Development" as a reference book for developing Android applications using new features of Android 4.0 with its clearly explained, step-by-step sample codes.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

What is Android Compability Package


Android has some great new APIs released with Android 3.0 and its later versions. However, many users don't upgrade their devices to the latest Android platform. Google released the Android Compatibility Package that contains support for some of the new APIs released with Android 3.0 and its later versions. In this way, developers could develop applications that use new APIs and work in older Android versions. Some of the classes that are included in the Android Compatibility Package are as follows:

  • Fragment

  • FragmentManager

  • FragmentTransaction

  • ListFragment

  • DialogFragment

  • LoaderManager

  • Loader

  • AsyncTaskLoader

  • CursorLoader

Some useful APIs such as animation classes, action bar, and FragmentMapActivity are not included in the Android Compatibility Package.