Thursday, November 7, 2013

Anddroid Kit kat 4.4 has been Released with Nexus 5 With Awesome Features

Bluetooth MAP support

Android now supports the Message Access Profile (MAP) so Bluetooth-enabled cars can exchange messages with your devices.

Chromecast support

With your Android device and a Chromecast, you can enjoy your favorite online entertainment, from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus, and Google Play on your HDTV.

Chrome web view

Applications that embed web content now use Chrome to render web components accurately and quickly.

Closed captioning

Android now supports closed captioning and subtitles. To turn on closed captioning, go to Settings > Accessibility and turn on Captions.

Device management built-in

If you ever lose your device, you can find or wipe it with the Android Device Manager

Downloads app redesign

The Downloads app has been redesigned, giving you new sorting options and list and grid views for all the files you’ve downloaded.

Easy home screen switching

If you love to customize your device and have installed one or more home screen replacements, you can switch between them easily in Settings > Home.

Email app refresh

The redesigned Email app has a fresh new look with nested folders, contact photos and better navigation.

Full-screen wallpapers with preview

Your wallpaper now extends through the notification tray and system buttons. And when you change your wallpaper, you can preview just how it will look before you set it.*

HDR+ photography

HDR+ mode on Nexus 5 automatically snaps a rapid burst of photos and combines them to give you the best possible single shot. Daytime pictures are vivid with clean shadows, and nighttime photos are sharp with less noise.*

Infrared blasting

On devices with an infrared (IR) blaster, Android now supports applications for remote control of TVs and other nearby devices.

Location in Quick Settings

Access your location settings from anywhere with a new tile in Quick Settings.

Location modes and monitoring

If you want to conserve battery, go to Settings > Location to switch between high accuracy and battery-saving location modes. There’s no need to toggle GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile network settings. And to see which apps have recently requested your location, go to Settings > Location.

Low-power audio playback

Android 4.4 on Nexus 5 lets you listen to music for longer - up to 60 hours of audio playback.*

Music and movie-seeking from lock screen

Jump to a specific part of a song or video from your lock screen. Just long press on the play or pause button and then select the point you want.

Secure app sandboxes

Application sandboxes have been hardened with Security-Enhanced Linux.

Step counting built-in

When you use fitness apps like Moves on Nexus 5, the phone acts as a pedometer to count steps. Android 4.4 and updated hardware make this a more battery-friendly way to measure your activity.

Tap to pay, built a new way

Android 4.4 introduces a new, open architecture for NFC payments that works with any mobile carrier, and lets apps manage your payment information in the cloud or on your device. Now you can tap to pay with Google Wallet or other apps at more than a million stores.

Touchscreen improvements

Improved software and Nexus 5’s new hardware mean Android responds to your touch faster and more accurately than ever before.*


 

Just say “Ok Google”

You don’t need to touch the screen to get things done. When on your home screen* or in Google Now, just say “Ok Google” to launch voice search, send a text, get directions or even play a song.








 

A work of art

While listening to music on your device, or while projecting movies to Chromecast, you’ll see beautiful full-screen album and movie art when your device is locked. You can play, pause, or seek to a specific moment.
 

 

 

Immerse yourself

The book you're reading, the game you're playing, or the movie you're watching — now all of these take center stage with the new immersive mode, which automatically hides everything except what you really want to see. Just swipe the edge of the screen to bring back your status bar and navigation buttons.




















Faster multitasking

Android 4.4 takes system performance to an all-time high by optimizing memory and improving your touchscreen so that it responds faster and more accurately than ever before. This means that you can listen to music while browsing the web, or race down the highway with the latest hit game, all without a hitch.




Smart & Simple

Google smarts improve every corner of the Android experience.


 

 

The future is calling

The new phone app automatically prioritizes your contacts based on the people you talk to the most. You can also search for nearby places and businesses, your contacts, or people in your Google Apps domain.






 

 

A smarter caller ID

Whenever you get a call from a phone number not in your contacts, your phone will look for matches from businesses with a local listing on Google Maps.
















All your messages in the same place

Never miss a message, no matter how your friend sends it. With the new Hangouts app, all of your SMS and MMS messages are together in the same app, alongside your other conversations and video calls. And with the new Hangouts, you can even share your location and send animated GIFs.






















Emoji everywhere

Sometimes words can’t express how you feel. For that, there’s Emoji, the colorful Japanese characters, now available on Google Keyboard.





Grab & Go

New features help you get things done while you’re on the move. 


 

Print wherever, whenever

Now you can print photos, documents, and web pages from your phone or tablet. You can print to any printer connected to Google Cloud Print, to HP ePrint printers, and to other printers that have apps in the Google Play Store.









Pick a file, any file

From apps like Quickoffice, you can open and save files on Google Drive, other cloud storage services, or your device. And with quick access to recently used files, it's easier than ever to send the file you were just working on.



Your office, anywhere

Create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations from your phone or tablet with the newly redesigned Quickoffice


Thursday, May 23, 2013

Google I/O 2013 Sessions

Google I/O is an annual developer-focused conference held by Google in San Francisco, California. Google I/O features highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android,ChromeChrome OS, Google APIs, Google Web ToolkitApp Engine, and more

Click on the Following Link for 2013 Sessions

https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions

Thursday, January 24, 2013

GATE Materials For CSE

ALL THE BEST for them who are preparing for GATE Exam  Start with discrete mathematics,  Data structures, Switching theory and logic circuits, Computer Organization, FLAT, LP, DAA, Operating Systems,DBMS...etc.

for materials click on below link

Click here to download

Saturday, January 19, 2013

IT/CSE/MCA Projects download here

Hi friends here iam providing single link for downloading projects for more queries contact me at softwaresainath@gmail.com and my Facebook Profile

Click here to download projects  

Friday, January 4, 2013

How to Install Ubuntu in Any Android Phone


Ubuntu New LogoTime has arrived to taste the latest version of Ubuntu OS right on your Android smartphone. While the World is moving towards Open Source, the likes of Apple will soon have to think about this biggest threat as the number of Android activations per day are way more than that of Apple. So, making use of Android’s open sourceness, in this article we will be checking out on how you can easily install Ubuntu on your Android with the help of simple instructions.


Disclaimer: We should not be held liable for any damage caused in the process of updating your Android Phone with Ubuntu. It is very unlikely that your device will be damaged if you follow all the instructions to the point which are mentioned in procedure. We also haven’t tried porting this to all Android devices but can test the same at your own risk.
ubuntu android
Backup all the data present in your phone with the help of below mentioned steps and not with any of the PC Suite tools as PC Suites doesn’t recognize your devices and you will have issues in restoring the data.
SMS – Use “SMS Backup & Restore app”,
Contacts – Sync with the Gmail application,
Call Log -Call Log and Restore
Images, Songs, Videos, Files – Copy to internal / External SD Card,
APN and MMS Settings – Note down from the path “Applications > Settings > Wireless and Network > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names
Ensure that your device is left with the minimum of 60% battery charge and also you will have to make sure that the  Samsung KIES Mode is enabled , which can be enabled from the Settings option. Also, enable the USB Debugging Mode too from the path “Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging”.
Pre Requisites:
  • Device needs to be Rooted & Busy Box should be installed,
  • A minimum of 1GHZ processor (recommended)
  • Android OS version should be Android Eclair 2.1 or higher
  • Android device should be on Custom ROM firmware and not on Stock Firmware ,
  • SD card with at least 3.5GB of free space for large image (2.5GB for small image)
  • ADB should be installed in your computer
  • Active Data connection on your device (Recommended 3G / Wi Fi)
  • Ext2 file system support
Assuming that you have followed all the mentioned instructions.
Procedure to Update Ubuntu on your Android:
  • Download Boot Strip & Ubuntu Image* from here to your computer and place the same in your device’s internal memory.
*Download the appropriate Ubuntu Image,
Ubuntu 12.04 v4 Core – just the basic install of ubuntu no GUI about 200MB to download and 750MB once extracted,
Ubuntu 12.04 v4 Small – Includes the LXDE desktop about 400MB to download and 2GB once extracted giving about 1GB free space and includes normal programs like firefox,
Ubuntu 12.04 v4 Full – The image you have been waiting for including Unity! plus a range of programs this is 1.3GB to download and 3.5GB once extracted with about 1.5GB free space
  • Once you have downloaded the above two zip files, extract the files in a folder called Ubuntu and copy the same to your Android phone’s internal memory.
  • Open the terminal in your phone and enter the below mentioned commands one after other in the same chronological manner,
su
cd /sdcard/Ubuntu
sh Ubuntu.sh
  • Up next you will be asked to select the screen size, select 800 x 480 or 1024 x 600 as per your choice. Up next, you will get a message root@localhost:/# : if you get this message then it means that Ubuntu is running and click on “Next”, (If you don’t get this then check with the device rooting status with the help of Root Checker app from Play Store and Busy Box installation)
  • Now, terminal will act as the Ubuntu command line, to connect to the GUI you need to run the VNC Viewer app which you have downloaded in your Android Phone.
  • Set your IP Address to local host and port number as 5900. Enter the password as “Ubuntu &the press “Connect” to connect and GUI will be rendering the same. Once you are finished in Ubuntu, type on exit in the command line and wait till the same shuts down.
Note: Just in a rare case if the device is not updated and it gets into the boot loop mode, you need to again clear the cache from the recovery mode and retry the whole process from the start.
So there you go, you have now successfully applied the update of Ubuntu in your Android. Do share with us in the comments section just in case if you face any issues as we will try our level best to sort out the same.
For More Details Please Click Here : http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/design

Friday, December 28, 2012

12 Steps to Better Code

Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don't follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understand that stuff. So I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. With all the time you save, you can go to medical school.
Steps Involved
  1. Do you use source control?
  2. Can you make a build in one step?
  3. Do you make daily builds?
  4. Do you have a bug database?
  5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
  6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
  7. Do you have a spec?
  8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
  9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
  10. Do you have testers?
  11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
  12. Do you do hallway usability testing?
The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point. Give your team 1 point for each "yes" answer. The bummer about The Joel Test is that you really shouldn't use it to make sure that your nuclear power plant software is safe.
A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.
Of course, these are not the only factors that determine success or failure: in particular, if you have a great software team working on a product that nobody wants, well, people aren't going to want it. And it's possible to imagine a team of "gunslingers" that doesn't do any of this stuff that still manages to produce incredible software that changes the world. But, all else being equal, if you get these 12 things right, you'll have a disciplined team that can consistently deliver.
1. Do you use source control?
I've used commercial source control packages, and I've used CVS, which is free, and let me tell you, CVS is fine. But if you don't have source control, you're going to stress out trying to get programmers to work together. Programmers have no way to know what other people did. Mistakes can't be rolled back easily. The other neat thing about source control systems is that the source code itself is checked out on every programmer's hard drive -- I've never heard of a project using source control that lost a lot of code.
2. Can you make a build in one step?
By this I mean: how many steps does it take to make a shipping build from the latest source snapshot? On good teams, there's a single script you can run that does a full checkout from scratch, rebuilds every line of code, makes the EXEs, in all their various versions, languages, and #ifdef combinations, creates the installation package, and creates the final media -- CDROM layout, download website, whatever.If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. And when you get closer to shipping, you want to have a very fast cycle of fixing the "last" bug, making the final EXEs, etc. If it takes 20 steps to compile the code, run the installation builder, etc., you're going to go crazy and you're going to make silly mistakes.
For this very reason, the last company I worked at switched from WISE to InstallShield: we required that the installation process be able to run, from a script, automatically, overnight, using the NT scheduler, and WISE couldn't run from the scheduler overnight, so we threw it out. (The kind folks at WISE assure me that their latest version does support nightly builds.)
3. Do you make daily builds?
When you're using source control, sometimes one programmer accidentally checks in something that breaks the build. For example, they've added a new source file, and everything compiles fine on their machine, but they forgot to add the source file to the code repository. So they lock their machine and go home, oblivious and happy. But nobody else can work, so they have to go home too, unhappy.Breaking the build is so bad (and so common) that it helps to make daily builds, to insure that no breakage goes unnoticed. On large teams, one good way to insure that breakages are fixed right away is to do the daily build every afternoon at, say, lunchtime. Everyone does as many checkins as possible before lunch. When they come back, the build is done. If it worked, great! Everybody checks out the latest version of the source and goes on working. If the build failed, you fix it, but everybody can keep on working with the pre-build, unbroken version of the source.
On the Excel team we had a rule that whoever broke the build, as their "punishment", was responsible for babysitting the builds until someone else broke it. This was a good incentive not to break the build, and a good way to rotate everyone through the build process so that everyone learned how it worked.
Read more about daily builds in my article Daily Builds are Your Friend.
4. Do you have a bug database?
I don't care what you say. If you are developing code, even on a team of one, without an organized database listing all known bugs in the code, you are going to ship low quality code. Lots of programmers think they can hold the bug list in their heads. Nonsense. I can't remember more than two or three bugs at a time, and the next morning, or in the rush of shipping, they are forgotten. You absolutely have to keep track of bugs formally.Bug databases can be complicated or simple. A minimal useful bug database must include the following data for every bug:
  • complete steps to reproduce the bug
  • expected behavior
  • observed (buggy) behavior
  • who it's assigned to
  • whether it has been fixed or not
If the complexity of bug tracking software is the only thing stopping you from tracking your bugs, just make a simple 5 column table with these crucial fields and start using it.
For more on bug tracking, read Painless Bug Tracking.
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
The very first version of Microsoft Word for Windows was considered a "death march" project. It took forever. It kept slipping. The whole team was working ridiculous hours, the project was delayed again, and again, and again, and the stress was incredible. When the dang thing finally shipped, years late, Microsoft sent the whole team off to Cancun for a vacation, then sat down for some serious soul-searching.
What they realized was that the project managers had been so insistent on keeping to the "schedule" that programmers simply rushed through the coding process, writing extremely bad code, because the bug fixing phase was not a part of the formal schedule. There was no attempt to keep the bug-count down. Quite the opposite. The story goes that one programmer, who had to write the code to calculate the height of a line of text, simply wrote "return 12;" and waited for the bug report to come in about how his function is not always correct. The schedule was merely a checklist of features waiting to be turned into bugs. In the post-mortem, this was referred to as "infinite defects methodology".To correct the problem, Microsoft universally adopted something called a "zero defects methodology". Many of the programmers in the company giggled, since it sounded like management thought they could reduce the bug count by executive fiat. Actually, "zero defects" meant that at any given time, the highest priority is to eliminate bugs before writing any new code. Here's why.In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.For example, when you make a typo or syntax error that the compiler catches, fixing it is basically trivial.When you have a bug in your code that you see the first time you try to run it, you will be able to fix it in no time at all, because all the code is still fresh in your mind.If you find a bug in some code that you wrote a few days ago, it will take you a while to hunt it down, but when you reread the code you wrote, you'll remember everything and you'll be able to fix the bug in a reasonable amount of time.But if you find a bug in code that you wrote a few months ago, you'll probably have forgotten a lot of things about that code, and it's much harder to fix. By that time you may be fixing somebody else's code, and they may be in Aruba on vacation, in which case, fixing the bug is like science: you have to be slow, methodical, and meticulous, and you can't be sure how long it will take to discover the cure.And if you find a bug in code that has already shipped, you're going to incur incredible expense getting it fixed.That's one reason to fix bugs right away: because it takes less time. There's another reason, which relates to the fact that it's easier to predict how long it will take to write new code than to fix an existing bug. For example, if I asked you to predict how long it would take to write the code to sort a list, you could give me a pretty good estimate. But if I asked you how to predict how long it would take to fix that bug where your code doesn't work if Internet Explorer 5.5 is installed, you can't even guess, because you don't know (by definition) what's causing the bug. It could take 3 days to track it down, or it could take 2 minutes.What this means is that if you have a schedule with a lot of bugs remaining to be fixed, the schedule is unreliable. But if you've fixed all the known bugs, and all that's left is new code, then your schedule will be stunningly more accurate.Another great thing about keeping the bug count at zero is that you can respond much faster to competition. Some programmers think of this as keeping the product ready to ship at all times. Then if your competitor introduces a killer new feature that is stealing your customers, you can implement just that feature and ship on the spot, without having to fix a large number of accumulated bugs.
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
Which brings us to schedules. If your code is at all important to the business, there are lots of reasons why it's important to the business to know when the code is going to be done. Programmers are notoriously crabby about making schedules. "It will be done when it's done!" they scream at the business people.Unfortunately, that just doesn't cut it. There are too many planning decisions that the business needs to make well in advance of shipping the code: demos, trade shows, advertising, etc. And the only way to do this is to have a schedule, and to keep it up to date.The other crucial thing about having a schedule is that it forces you to decide what features you are going to do, and then it forces you to pick the least important features and cut them rather than slipping into featuritis (a.k.a. scope creep).Keeping schedules does not have to be hard. Read my article Painless Software Schedules, which describes a simple way to make great schedules.
7. Do you have a spec?
Writing specs is like flossing: everybody agrees that it's a good thing, but nobody does it.I'm not sure why this is, but it's probably because most programmers hate writing documents. As a result, when teams consisting solely of programmers attack a problem, they prefer to express their solution in code, rather than in documents. They would much rather dive in and write code than produce a spec first.At the design stage, when you discover problems, you can fix them easily by editing a few lines of text. Once the code is written, the cost of fixing problems is dramatically higher, both emotionally (people hate to throw away code) and in terms of time, so there's resistance to actually fixing the problems. Software that wasn't built from a spec usually winds up badly designed and the schedule gets out of control.  This seems to have been the problem at Netscape, where the first four versions grew into such a mess that management stupidly decided to throw out the code and start over. And then they made this mistake all over again with Mozilla, creating a monster that spun out of control and took several years to get to alpha stage.My pet theory is that this problem can be fixed by teaching programmers to be less reluctant writers by sending them off to take an intensive course in writing. Another solution is to hire smart program managers who produce the written spec. In either case, you should enforce the simple rule "no code without spec".
Learn all about writing specs by reading my 4-part series.
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
There are extensively documented productivity gains provided by giving knowledge workers space, quiet, and privacy. The classic software management book Peopleware documents these productivity benefits extensively.Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- especially interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If a coworker asks you a question, causing a 1 minute interruption, but this knocks you out of the zone badly enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. Ahhh!
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Writing code in a compiled language is one of the last things that still can't be done instantly on a garden variety home computer. If your compilation process takes more than a few seconds, getting the latest and greatest computer is going to save you time. If compiling takes even 15 seconds, programmers will get bored while the compiler runs and switch over to reading The Onion, which will suck them in and kill hours of productivity.Debugging GUI code with a single monitor system is painful if not impossible. If you're writing GUI code, two monitors will make things much easier.Most programmers eventually have to manipulate bitmaps for icons or toolbars, and most programmers don't have a good bitmap editor available. Trying to use Microsoft Paint to manipulate bitmaps is a joke, but that's what most programmers have to do.At my last job, the system administrator kept sending me automated spam complaining that I was using more than ... get this ... 220 megabytes of hard drive space on the server. I pointed out that given the price of hard drives these days, the cost of this space was significantly less than the cost of the toilet paper I used. Spending even 10 minutes cleaning up my directory would be a fabulous waste of productivity.
Top notch development teams don't torture their programmers. Even minor frustrations caused by using underpowered tools add up, making programmers grumpy and unhappy. And a grumpy programmer is an unproductive programmer.
To add to all this... programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying competitive salaries!
10. Do you have testers?
If your team doesn't have dedicated testers, at least one for every two or three programmers, you are either shipping buggy products, or you're wasting money by having $100/hour programmers do work that can be done by $30/hour testers. Skimping on testers is such an outrageous false economy that I'm simply blown away that more people don't recognize it.Read Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers, an article I wrote about this subject.
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
Would you hire a magician without asking them to show you some magic tricks? Of course not.
Would you hire a caterer for your wedding without tasting their food? I doubt it. (Unless it's Aunt Marge, and she would hate you forever if you didn't let her make her "famous" chopped liver cake).Yet, every day, programmers are hired on the basis of an impressive resumé or because the interviewer enjoyed chatting with them. Or they are asked trivia questions ("what's the difference between CreateDialog() and DialogBox()?") which could be answered by looking at the documentation. You don't care if they have memorized thousands of trivia about programming, you care if they are able to produce code. Or, even worse, they are asked "AHA!" questions: the kind of questions that seem easy when you know the answer, but if you don't know the answer, they are impossible.Please, just stop doing this. Do whatever you want during interviews, but make the candidate write some code. (For more advice, read my Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.)
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.Good user interface design is not as hard as you would think, and it's crucial if you want customers to love and buy your product. You can read my free online book on UI design, a short primer for programmers.But the most important thing about user interfaces is that if you show your program to a handful of people, (in fact, five or six is enough) you will quickly discover the biggest problems people are having. Read Jakob Nielsen's article explaining why. Even if your UI design skills are lacking, as long as you force yourself to do hallway usability tests, which cost nothing, your UI will be much, much better.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Android, the world's most popular mobile platform

Android powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices in more than 190 countries around the world. It's the largest installed base of any mobile platform and growing fast—every day another million users power up their Android devices for the first time and start looking for apps, games, and other digital content.
Android gives you a world-class platform for creating apps and games for Android users everywhere, as well as an open marketplace for distributing to them instantly.

Android growth in device activations

Global partnerships and large installed base

Building on the contributions of the open-source Linux community and more than 300 hardware, software, and carrier partners, Android has rapidly become the fastest-growing mobile OS.
Every day more than 1 million new Android devices are activated worldwide.
Android’s openness has made it a favorite for consumers and developers alike, driving strong growth in app consumption. Android users download more than 1.5 billion apps and games from Google Play each month.
With it's partners, Android is continuously pushing the boundaries of hardware and software forward to bring new capabilities to users and developers. For developers, Android innovation lets you build powerful, differentiated applications that use the latest mobile technologies.

Powerful development framework

Easily optimize a single binary for phones, tablets, and other devices.
Android gives you everything you need to build best-in-class app experiences. It gives you a single application model that lets you deploy your apps broadly to hundreds of millions of users across a wide range of devices—from phones to tablets and beyond.
Android also gives you tools for creating apps that look great and take advantage of the hardware capabilities available on each device. It automatically adapts your UI to look it's best on each device, while giving you as much control as you want over your UI on different device types.
For example, you can create a single app binary that's optimized for both phone and tablet form factors. You declare your UI in lightweight sets of XML resources, one set for parts of the UI that are common to all form factors and other sets for optimzations specific to phones or tablets. At runtime, Android applies the correct resource sets based on its screen size, density, locale, and so on.
To help you develop efficiently, the Android Developer Tools offer a full Java IDE with advanced features for developing, debugging, and packaging Android apps. Using the IDE, you can develop on any available Android device or create virtual devices that emulate any hardware configuration.
1.5 billion downloads a month and growing. Get your apps in front of millions of users at Google's scale.

Open marketplace for distributing your apps

Google Play is the premier marketplace for selling and distributing Android apps. When you publish an app on Google Play, you reach the huge installed base of Android.
As an open marketplace, Google Play puts you in control of how you sell your products. You can publish whenever you want, as often as you want, and to the customers you want. You can distribute broadly to all markets and devices or focus on specific segments, devices, or ranges of hardware capabilities.
You can monetize in the way that works best for your business—priced or free, with in-app products or subscriptions—for highest engagement and revenues. You also have complete control of the pricing for your apps and in-app products and can set or change prices in any supported currency at any time.

Beyond growing your customer base, Google Play helps you build visibility and engagement across your apps and brand. As your apps rise in popularity, Google Play gives them higher placement in weekly "top" charts and rankings, and for the best apps promotional slots in curated collections.
Preinstalled on hundreds of millions of Android devices around the world, Google Play can be a growth engine for your business.
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Saturday, December 15, 2012

Introducing Android 4.2, A New and Improved Jelly Bean


Performance

We've worked with our partners to run Renderscript computation directly in the GPU on the Nexus 10, a first for any mobile computation platform.

New ways to engage users

Users can now place interactive lock screen widgets directly on their device lock screens, for instant access to favorite apps and content. With just a small update, you can adapt any app widget to run on the lock screen. Daydream is an interactive screensaver mode that users can encounter when their devices are charging or docked in a desk dock. You can create interactive daydreams that users display in this mode, and they can include any type of content. 

New interaction and entertainment experiences

Android 4.2 introduces platform support for external displays that goes beyond mirroring. Your apps can now target unique content to any number of displays attached to an Android device.

Enhancements for international users

To help you create better apps for users in languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, Android 4.2 includes native RTL support, including layout mirroring. With native RTL support, you can deliver the same great app experience to all of your users with minimal extra work. Android 4.2 also includes a variety of font and character optimizations for Korean, Japanese, Indic, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew writing systems.

To get started developing and testing, download the Android 4.2 Platform from the Android SDK Manager. For a complete overview of what's new, take a look at the Android 4.2 platform highlights or read more of the details in the API overview

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Google Play Seller Support in India


Over the past year, Android device activations in India have jumped more than 400%, bringing millions of new users to Google Play and driving huge increases in app downloads. In the last six months, Android users in India downloaded more apps than in the previous three years combined, and India has rocketed to become the fourth-largest market worldwide for app downloads. To help developers capitalize on this tremendous growth, we are launching Google Play seller support in India.

Starting today, developers in India can sell paid applications, in-app products, and subscriptions in Google Play, with monthly payouts to their local bank accounts. They can take advantage of all of the tools offered by Google Play to monetize their products in the best way for their businesses, and they can target their products to the paid ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users in India and across the world.

If you are an Android developer based in India, you can get started right away by signing in to your Developer Console and setting up a Google Checkout merchant account. If your apps are already published as free, you can monetize them by adding in-app products or subscriptions. For new apps, you can publish the apps as paid, in addition to selling in-app products or subscriptions.

When you’ve prepared your apps and in-app products, you can price them in any available currencies, publish, and then receive payouts and financial data in your local currency. Visit the developer help center for complete details.

Along with seller support, we're also adding buyer’s currency support for India. We encourage developers everywhere to visit your Developer Console as soon as possible to set prices for your products in Indian Rupees and other new currencies (such as Russian Rubles).