Google has just announced the release of their latest Android SDK, version m5-rc14. While developers across the globe have been hard at work creating their own applications that will be freely available on your next android enabled phone, many have shied away from diving in due to shortcomings in the beta platform.
The release of Android m5-rc14 sparks a sigh of relief from the developer world (scroll down for picture gallery). Google listened to input directly from developers and here are a few of the key updates announced:
A new user interface has been created for the old, boring placeholder. The UI will continue to be refined as time goes on. Remember, the base UI itself will be highly customizable by developer teams.
Layout animations and classes for setting and getting layout animations have been updated, allowing developers to further customize the appearance of their apps.
Geo-coding has been updated to allow developers to easily translate addresses into coordinates and coordinates into addresses, allowing better integration for locational based apps.
New media codecs allow Android developers to utilize a wider variety of media formats in their applications. The update adds OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX, and OTA.
Updated Eclipse plugin and Android Manifest editor
One quick rebuttal to the release is that there was still no updates to the telephony package that would allow developers to detect the phone number of ingoing and outgoing callers. We’re pretty sure that will follow shortly.
For developers looking for specs on the upgrade, take a look at: