Questions on Pro Android 3

Hi Satya / Dave,

I would like ask some questions on Pro Android 3:

1. I understand that Android 3.0 is specifically optimized for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. Does this book explain on the possibility to use Android 3.0 on smartphones?

2. Does this book also cover on how to create an application with advanced 3D components and multitasking?

Thanks.

Hendy,

the book covers both 2.3 and 3.0.

The 3.0 api is not available for phones.

Only the fragments api of 3.0 is available as a backport on 2.3. So really you cannot use 3.0 on phones at all.

I am sure very soon Google is going to release a next version of SDK for phones with equivalent future.

Google is non-commital how these new APIs will progress.

Hope this helps
Satya

Sort of, and yes.

We wrote 3 full chapters on the new features in Android 3.0 for tablets, but we did not address how these can be used on smartphones. Google released a compatibility SDK for fragments on Android pre-3.0 (all the way down to 1.6), which is similar to fragments in 3.x but not the same. For example, in Android 3.0, the Activity class knows about Fragments. Prior to Android 3.0, an Activity class doesn't know about Fragments. Makes sense, right? So the compatibility package for pre-3.0 includes the FragmentActivity class which you must use instead of the Activity class if you want your pre-3.0 activities to work with fragments. We included a sample application in the source code (ShakespeareSDK) that uses the compatibility SDK to run a fragment app in pre-3.0, but we didn't cover this in the book. The next major release of Android should provide native support for fragments for smartphones. Then everything you've learned about fragments should apply to smartphones as well, and you won't need to know about the compatibility SDK. My personal feeling is that you should use fragments on tablets and not worry about fragments on pre-3.0 devices. They're buggy and certain features don't even work (MapActivity has no FragmentMapActivity for example).

Regarding 3D, we absolutely cover 3D with almost 70 pages on OpenGL ES in chapter 20. Multitasking is covered in quite a number of places, including extensive coverage of intents, services, threads, background threads, AsyncTasks, handlers, broadcast receivers, alarms, notifications and more. We don't give you a brief statement that says "Android does multitasking". We go into the details so you truly understand what it is and how it works.

- dave

However I must put a disclaimer and correct one "misstatement" on Amazon and Apress material for the book.

Although we cover beginers OpenGL really really well it is far from saying one can use it to write 3D components. That would be wrong to say that. If you are an experienced OpenGL developer you will be certainly disappointed with book.

I need to work with Apress to correct that statement about "3D components". That is a tall order.

But if you are a beginer and wanting to the 3D component route, you cannot do without understanding OpenGL and our book certainly does a real good job with that.

Satya