IO 2014 Platform Evolution and L's Developer preview And Material Design

Second Portion of this year's IO Totally focus's on Platform Evolution and in platform evolution the main focus is on upcoming L release of Android. According to Sundar pichai "L is the most comprehensive releases of the Android History".

L has 5k new API's and it will not be for just mobile but for form factors beyond mobile. One of the thing about L is, it has been followed by a radial design approach and here comes the new fresh and bold look of L release.

 Design defines your experiences and motions and the L release is crafted with this thought to provide you one consistent vision across watch, mobile, tablet and laptop. It is not the whole story, This new release has used dynamic experiences with material design too. The main idea focus on "pixel with not just colours but with also depth". it wont just change the colour but will respond to touch.

Matias Duarte said "scenes and shadows provide meaning about what you can touch, and how it will move. And in real world every small change and position and depth creates suddle but important changes in lighting and shadows." So this L release will allow you to specify an elevation value for any UI surface. And Framework will render it in correct perspective with virtual light sources and real-time shadows. 

Animation has been considered more seriously in this release and they have added more advanced changes in this. In real life nothing teleports from one place to other. That's why it is  so important to animate every change on screen that it make sense. In the L preview you will now be able to create seamless animation from any screen to any other between activities and even between apps. And they have shown a sneak peak of familiar Gmail application in the new material design. "It is delightful when you touch is rewarded with motion" and as a apart of L preview all of your applications UI building blocks have been updated to include rich animated feed back. And no detail is too smart to bring smile on your face like one the reload button, playback controls everything.

Also All material design capabilities to the web through polymer, and as web designer you will be able to develop, applications out of the Material design building blocks with all of the same surfaces all graphics and smooth animations as 60 frames per second. And between the L preview and Polymer you can bring the same rich fluid material design to every screen. And to help you to take full advantage of this framework, the completely redesigned and created one unified set of style guidelines that will help designers and developers to understand best practices and build consistent beautiful experiences. And 1st draft of design guidelines is available at  Google.com/design.

Surely the L and Polymer will entertain us soon and it will also help Google to divert more users to Android all over the world.

Read More

IO 2014 Mobile Momentum and Android One

In this year's Keynote viewing party's were 597 from 85 countries in 6 continents and one million people were viewing live stream of Google IO. Sundar Pichai starts IO by telling the ratio of android female developers which is 20 and last year it was 8.

 Then he told that 30 days active users in this year is 1 Billion which was 530 million users last year. Also he told that Android users send 20 billion sms daily and 93 million images are taken daily and the 31 million of them are duck faces. :)

Also they estimated that android steps are 1.5 trillion daily, 100 billion times phones are checked each day.

 Major change have been noted in Android tablet share in Global market is around 62% which was 46% last year. And YouTube Tablet view is 42% whiach was 28% last year. Also App installs increase 236% on Tablets.

Also he told about the goal of reaching to next 5 billion users by introducing most promising smart phone that is Android One by micromax which will be the high quality cheapest phone around 100$, Also Karbonn and Spice will be  on the track soon. Also network providers will be requested to give affordable packages for this.

  

So it is the good step taken by Google, and it can surely covers the next 5 billion users soon, what do you think about that?

Read More

Bugs are fixed and new features have been added in Hangouts update

News by:  Hamad Shaikh 7th June 2014

Reportedly Google hangouts has a new feature called "sketch a message", and with this feature you can sketch anything in hangouts app and send it in message but this feature is not rolled out yet but according to android police many people reported that they have already saw this feature.But it is not the only thing to tell you, also hangouts update 2.1.233 came up with the bug fixes and also with some other features. As I posted before that hangouts was crashing on reload of emojis and battery drain issue is also resolved in this update.

  There’s also a hidden contacts area in the settings menu separate from blocked people allowing you to hide people, while still being able to see those conversations. Even though Hangouts has allowed users to block people for a while, this is the first time you've had access to the people you've blocked. Another new feature includes the ability for users to change notification sounds for individual chats.

So you can wait for this update by playstore which have feature of staged update or can download now from this link hangouts thanks to XDA Otherwise you can download app from Playstore.

Read More

Almost 14% device jumped to Kitkat

Android 4.4 Kitkat is most demanded OS by every android user due to its low ram need. but even then it will take some time to cover all the devices due to some ART runtime compiler and its latest features.Although it covered 8.5% last month and till 4th June, it is 13.6 which is not bad but could be more than that. Hopefully we expect that it will cover the more devices soon! and from above graph we can see that Honeycomb is no more available, and jelly bean API 16 is dropped from 34% to 29% the reason could be the rise of API 17 from 18 to 19% and API 18 from 9 to 10.3%, but main reason will always be Kitkat.

Also other versions dropped from its previous values as stated Gingerbread from 17.8 to 14.9% and Ice cream sandwich from 14.3 to to 12.3% but Froyo is still there which was expected to be invisible in this month but it got slightly dropped from 1 to 0.8%.

We can expect more drop in older versions in july and rise in Kitkat. What do you think?

Read More

Elevation Levels for Bikers and Hikers has been added to Google Maps 8.1.0

News by:  Hamad Ali 31st May 2014

The Maps app for Android has been updated to 8.1.0 bringing the elevation levels feature for Bikers and Hikers so that they can also avail the Maps features, so if you are a biker or a hiker, you will now be able to see exactly how hard you will need to work to get to where you’re going.

As usual, this update is rolling in stages, but Thanks to XDA you can download the APK , as well as the old fashioned Play Store links.

Download APK From XDA

Playstore APK download link

news source: talkandroid

Read More