If you haven’t checked it out yet, I recommend taking a look at the new Android Design website. There are a lot of resources and interesting information on developing attractive apps for Ice Cream Sandwich, Android’s newest platform. With Ice Cream Sandwich comes new changes, such as the deprecation of the menu bar.
Question for you, dear reader: What do you all think about the current site design? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, both positive and negative.
Android is booming very rapidly, and the market share has gone from nothing to dominating the market, within only a couple of years. I still remember when just a bit more than a year ago, competitors still thought that Android was only going to fill a niche market, and that it was “clunky” and “slow”. Well, its open nature has led to a rapid explosion of devices with Android, and rapidly improving speeds are getting rid of the Android “lag”.
From the Android Developer’s Blog:
The Android Market has recently crossed 10 billion downloads, and Google is celebrating:
“One billion is a pretty big number by any measurement. However, when it’s describing the speed at which something is growing, it’s simply amazing. This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month. We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012.”
For 10 cents, why not try out a couple of apps? It’s amazing to see just how the quality of apps has improved over the past year, especially games. Unfortunately my Nexus S did reboot while playing one of the games, so the stability still isn’t all there, but I definitely do see an improvement in quality as compared to last year.
Note: If you don’t see the apps at 10 cents on your phone, try going to the Android Market from your PC, instead. I had the same issue, where the app was listed at $4.99 on my phone and at 10 cents on the web. If you have a Google account linked to your phone, then you can just purchase from the web and Google will automatically send the app to your phone.
It’s been ages since I last posted an update, I know. I went away during the summer and neglected the site upon coming back, and now that I’m busy with school it’s been harder than ever to find the time to find an update. Excuses, excuses, I know. 😉
In any case, many of you were asking for a tutorial and demo on texturing, and this is what I’m going to talk about next. There also seems to be a lot more interest for Android tutorials rather than WebGL tutorials, so I will be focusing more time on Android. Let me know if you guys have other thoughts and suggestions.
There was nothing wrong with the Google Code project site, and in fact I prefer the simplicity of Google’s interface, but I also prefer to develop using Git. Once you’ve gotten used to Git, it’s hard to go back to anything else. An advantage of GitHub is that it should be easier for others to fork and contribute to the project if they wish to.
As always, let me know your comments and thoughts. The code for Lesson 4 is already done, so I’ll start writing it up now and hopefully publish that soon!
